MIO-ECSDE/MEdIES e-learning course on marine litter completed sucessfully!

Some 69 partcipants from 27 Euro-Mediterranean and other countries benefited from the MIO-ECSDE/MEdIES e-learning course on marine litter, that successfully ran during May 2016. The e-course was implemented within the framework of the IPA-Adriatic funded DeFishGear project, under the auspices of UNEP/MAP. This was the fourth round of the e-course aiming to introduce the educational pack ‘Know, Feel, Act! to Stop Marine Litter’, to formal and non formal educators. The e-course sought to train educators on how to use the educational pack, build confidence and intent to integrate marine litter education and the pack itself in their teaching practice.

The pack is an output of the EU funded MARLISCO project that has been translated in the languages of 15 Euro-Mediterranean countries. The material contains a set of 17 educational activities examining the characteristics, sources, effects and possible ways to tackle the problem, addressing it from an environmental, societal, cultural and economic point of view. The material has been designed to primarily serve middle school level, but can be easily adjusted to fit the needs of younger or older students, or to be used outside the formal schooling system.

The 2-week long e-course is equivalent to an 1.5-day face-to-face train-the-trainer seminar. An exeptional feature of the e-course is that it treats learners as experts that bring in their own ideas to share with others and results in jointly generated outcomes for which the learners feel a high level of ownership.

In this round, the majority of participants came from the following countries: Albania, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Italy, Jordan, Latvia, Lebanon, Malta, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Palestine, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Tunisia, Turkey, UK, USA). Similarly to the previous rounds of the e-course, the completion rate of the full e-course was some 30%, which is much higher than the average completion rate for massive open online courses (~7%). Furthermore, some additional 32% of the 111 registrants completed parts of the e-course.

The MIO-ECSDE/MEdIES e-learning course on marine litter has so far allowed 367 educators from across Europe and beyond to work together and communicate best practices and ideas. The very high completion rates of the e-course together with the high level of course content satisfaction of the participants are very encouraging and motivating for undertaking one more round in the near future.

For more info: http://www.medies.net/articles.asp?cID=8&aID=1067