Forma Comuna Aprende

Project Description

FormaComuna Aprende is seeking funds for the development and implementation of a learning management system to deliver a modular course on tools and applications for administering a micro-local website. The program will provide training on the usage of web resources how to take advantage of Web tools to support local projects and to help community-based organization to accomplish their goals. Participants will acquire and improve skills on using the Web for strengthening community ties, promoting ideas for new social development projects, communicating to constituencies, and keeping information flow with donors and government agencies.

By leading discussions in a course forum, instructors will guide participants through a decision-making process for identifying how using Drupal, CiviCRM and the supplementary tools included in the course can help to achieve their organization's objectives. After the group identifies what they need to do, participants will be directed to appropriate tutorials for creating and publishing content relevant to their community work. They will use detailed tutorials and how-to guides for performing the required tasks and publishing the relevant content in a trial web space.

The core tutorial will instruct participants how to organize, manage, and publish content on a website using Drupal. Another tutorial will instruct participants on integrating CiviCRM onto Drupal and using it for recording and managing information about various constituents, as well as tracking budgets, events, and conversations, or managing e-mails lists for different types of constituents. Additional tutorials will instruct participants on customizing and using Drupal modules for publishing media content such as video, audio, Flickr’s photos, and using GMap, polls, and community calendar, as well as news with comments, ratings, and related content features.

Additionally, the LMS will include:

Chats for participants to ask quick questions to the instructor or to their peers.

Group workshops for participants to share their ongoing assignments, and to get feedback from the instructor and peers using pre-defined scoring criteria.

The course content will be generated by FormaComuna by adapting, expanding and/or translating tutorials on Drupal, CiviCRM, and other media content publishing tools. Detailed how-to guides tailored to the needs of the participants will also be developed by FormaComuna.

Course materials (tutorials, how-to guides, introductory presentations, and reference sources) will be online to be accessed by the participant whenever s/he has opportunity. Synchronic meetings will be held through the discussion forum feature on a scheduled basis. Forum meetings will be available in the archives for participants' future reference. Group workshops will also be online for participants to share their work-in-progress, to get and receive feedback, and to publish their course projects. Online delivery is a solution for overcoming barriers to face-to-face meetings posed by participants' unconventional work schedules and family commitments. A learning environment embedded in the web will also make more evident for participants the advantages of using IT tools to boost their projects.

All program materials will be available in Spanish, Venezuela’s official language.

Courses will be delivered using Moodle, a free-open LMS complying with SCORM standards for online education. Program implementation requires a web server running Apache, and supporting MySQL 5.0 and PHP v.5. Participants need computers with Internet access.

Target Population

The target audience comprises members of community-based organizations from low-income neighborhoods located in Caracas(Venezuela). This population has low participation rate on Internet access (11%), and low frequency of use (twice a week on average). Moreover, they use Internet mainly for e-mail (46%), chat & IM (41%), and visiting mainstream media websites (22%), rather than content creation (4%, mostly photo-sharing) and productivity enhancement (20%)1. Thus, their involvement in this program will boost substantially their ability to take advantage of the resources available in the information society.

Program participants will be recruited among activists involved in organizations working on local development plans. Our promotion team will visit low-income neighborhoods in Caracas to explain activists the benefits of using web tools and generating micro-local citizen media websites. We will emphasizes the benefits of increasing public transparency and accountability, making easier to work collaboratively in a project, bridging with other people and organizations working in similar projects, and strengthening community's ties.

In the first year, we expect to reach 350 participants from 10 different communities that will learn how to build micro-local websites. These participants should become multipliers in their communities, and introduce others into the use of Internet citizen media for community organizing and advancing social development projects.

FormaComuna participants will get free Internet access through IT centers located at low-income neighborhoods.

Participants will share their Web projects (weblogs, podcasts, etc.), and exchange ideas about how to create content that fit their community's culture and help to achieve their goals. Since content created during the program will be directly related to their organization's projects and will be suitable for using in their real community website, we expect that participants will be strongly motivated to work in projects and willing to share ideas and resources with each other.

FormaComuna team

FormaComuna team members have worked promoting community organization and community media among this population for several years. Program director has taught how to produce community education audiovisuals in low-income neighborhoods; worked with community spokespersons from high poverty neighborhoods in order to get their news into a national broadcasting network; taught Social Work students how to promote community media among low-income population. IT coordinator has experience training community organizations members in Internet usage. Community participation coordinator has experience producing content for citizen media and teaching citizen journalism to low-income people.

Program director is knowledgeable in curriculum development and IT uses in education. Graphic designer has experience on designing websites using Drupal. Programmer is skilled on implementing courses on Moodle. All FormaComuna members are receiving advanced training on Moodle, in a continuing education course at Central University of Venezuela.

Challenges

The major challenges to the project success are the following:

(1)Most potential participants lack reliable Internet connection from home.

(2)Venezuelan Internet users' tend to get information from the Web rather than publishing their own content and taking part in online conversations.

(3)Most community-based organizations in low-income neighborhoods do not incorporate Web tools in their projects development.

(4)Political polarization make difficult to do outreach in low-income neighborhoods.

FormaComuna will use the following actions to overcome those challenges:

(1)Assist program participants in getting Internet access by means of an agreement with Infocentros.

(2)Offer opportunities for becoming involved in online conversations that are relevant for course participants and explaining them how publishing their own content can help them to achieve their goals.

(3)Tailor web tools and practices taught in the program to the real needs of the Caracas' community organizations.

(4)Assign recruitment responsibilities to people respected among community organizations besides her/his political viewpoints and design outreach policies that ensure participation from members of organizations along the whole political spectrum, assuring inclusiveness and democratic pluralism.

Measures of Program Impact

The first direct measure of project success in to register active participation in the course. Moodle provides users' logs for monitoring participants' usage of course resources.

A second measure of program success will be group evaluation of the quality and the usefulness of the content generated by participants during the course.

A third measure of impact will be the number of participants and communities still active generating Web content after a year of participation in the course.

Contacto: ipuyosa@nosumacero.org