Course introduction from Cobra Collective UK on Vimeo.

This online course has been developed for the ‘Increasing the resilience of biodiversity and livelihoods in Colombo’s wetlands’ project, funded by The Darwin Initiative, United Kingdom. The project works with communities to monitor wetlands, communicate to decision makers and manage their wetlands to protect biodiversity and maintain essential wetland benefits that support the livelihoods of the urban poor within Colombo, Sri Lanka.

The project is being delivered by the following partners:

• International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Colombo, Sri Lanka
• Cobra Collective (CC), United Kingdom
• Biodiversity Secretariat, Ministry of Environment, Sri Lanka  
• Department of Wildlife Conservation, Ministry of Wildlife and Forest Conservation, Sri Lanka
• Wetland Management Division, Sri Lanka Land Development Corporation (SLLDC), Sri Lanka, Ministry of Urban Development, Coast Conservation, Waste Disposal, and Community Cleanliness, Sri Lanka 
  
• Central Environmental Authority (CEA), Ministry of Environment, Sri Lanka 
• Urban Development Authority (UDA), Ministry of Urban Development, Coast Conservation, Waste Disposal, and Community Cleanliness, Sri Lanka 
• Field Ornithology Group of Sri Lanka (FOGSL), Sri Lanka

Although the online course has been developed for the project in Colombo, it builds on work by the Cobra Collective on several projects and is available and applicable to anyone that wants to work with their community or another community to tackle environmental challenges and issues. This course focuses on wetland habitats but can be used with communities living in or near different landscapes.

Community management and monitoring

Community management is the implementation of a management approach that provides a solution to social and environmental challenges the community faces. Community monitoring helps communities understand changes that have occurred and assess whether management interventions are working or not. Community monitoring and management is developed and carried out by communities themselves. This course introduces the concepts, techniques and participatory approaches you can use to engage your community or a community you are working with to monitor and manage their own solutions to the challenges they face.

Learning outcomes

This course covers lots of different topics to help you engage with your community or another community you are working. It will help community monitoring and management carried out by the community and engagement with policy makers. The following topics are covered in this course:

• Unit 1 - Core concepts of:
• Action learning
  
• Community engagement
  
• Community owned solutions
  
• Impact evaluation

• Unit 2 - Participatory techniques for engaging communities including:
• Workshops
• Focus groups
• Interviews
• Informal discussions
• Participatory drawing
• Participatory photography
• Participatory video

• Unit 3 - Digital skills including:
• Introduction to computers
• Mobile devices
• Internet use and communication
• Document preparation
• Presentations
• Data analysis
• Image editing
• Audio and video editing
• Digital ethics

• Unit 4 - Environmental monitoring approaches including:
• Methods for environmental data collection
• How to plan a successful monitoring study
• How to analyse and share findings

• Unit 5 - Community monitoring approach including:
• What is community monitoring
• How to develop a community monitoring programme
• How to evaluate a community monitoring programme

• Unit 6 – Community wetland management approach including:
• Our relationships with water and wetlands
• What is community management
• How to identify community owned solutions for community management
• How to implement and evaluation community management

• Unit 7 – Integrating community monitoring and management into frameworks of policy and management including:
• What policy is and who policy makers are
• How to successfully engage policy makers

Who should study the course?

There are no prerequisite skills or knowledge needed before taking this course. Just openness, curiosity and interest in learning about how to engage with communities. This course is designed to be useful for a community member that wants to mobilise their community to deliver monitoring, management or engagement with policy makers. It has also been designed to be useful for practitioners that work for government agencies or non-governmental organisations that wants to more effectively work with communities.

How learners can go about the course and the self assessment

On the home page of each course unit (you will need to enrol on each) you will find the following tabs: “Course description”, “Course content” and “Course review”. The “Course description”, where you are now, contains a brief course description and outcomes. By clicking the “Course content tab” you can see the list of the course lessons. Each lesson contains a video and a final self-assessment quiz. Some lessons also contain text and illustrations. The videos can be directly played within the course page. To turn on the video subtitles click on the icon “CC” that is located at the bottom right corner of the video. 

To access the quizzes click on the icon

To start the quiz click “Start Attempt”. After you’ve answered all questions make sure you click “Finish Attempt” and then “Submit all and finish” to see the quiz evaluation. You will need to achieve a grade of 70% or more to pass the quiz. You can take all the quizzes as often as you'd like. To go back to the other lessons click on “Course content”. You can take the self-assessment quizzes as many times as you want. We recommend you take them until you get everything correct to make sure you fully understand the material. If you want to send us any feedback on the course you can go to the Homepage and click on the “Course Review” tab.

Gain a statement of participation

By studying the course you will have the opportunity to gain a statement of participation upon completing the course – you need to click on the ‘Enrol’ button to be able to do the quizzes and activities and to download your statement of participation.

About this course

To complete the online course it will take approximately 24 hours. However, to deliver the techniques with a community then it will take longer. For example, to identify a community owned solution with a community would take approximately 12 hours.

Copyright information

This course is made available under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0: Cobra Collective

Any third-party materials featured in this course are used with permission and are not ours to give away. These materials are not subject to the Creative Commons licence. See the terms and conditions and our FAQs. Please see the course acknowledgements for further information about copyright details.

Citation for the course

Cobra Collective. 2021. Community Environmental Monitoring & Management Online Training Course.

Acknowledgments

Illustrations for Units 1, 4, 5 & 6 were produced by Ed Dingli (www.eddingli.com). 

Animations for Units 1, 4, 5 & 6 were produced by Rosie Miles (www.rosiesmiles.com).

Graphics for Unit 2 were produced by the Cobra Collective.

Graphics for Unit 3 were produced by the University of Guyana.