Designing Deforestation Monitoring Training for Ex-Combatants in Colombia
Last year I was involved in a project, Peace with Nature, aimed at helping ex-FARC combatants in Colombia develop nature based businesses, and re-integrate into society. Ex-combatants received training in a number of biodiversity and ecotourism topics, including marketing and business skills.
My task was to develop some training in deforestation monitoring using satellite data. There were a few challenges here:
- The level of formal education which the ex-combatants had received was not known, and probably varied a lot from person to person
- The communities the ex-combatants lived in were remote, and lacked fast or reliable internet, or in some cases internet at all, except for mobile phones
- The course was going to be presented in person by another academic (I was unable to travel to Colombia for health reasons)
Working with some local academic partners, my supervisor and I worked to create a set of learning objectives fit to the overall aims of the project, and the context of the learners. Specifically we wanted learners who finished the course to be able to:
- Understand at a basic level how satellite imagery works
- Describe how satellites can be used to monitor forest cover
- Describe how forest cover and biodiversity are linked
- Understand how biodiversity can positively and negatively affect your local community
- Use free online tools to track and understand forest cover change in your local area
- Share information about forest change in your area for your own purposes
I’d already taught several classes as a teaching assistant, including designing and delivering both online and in person workshops and tutorials. I also have worked in eLearning course design and production, so I was looking forward to getting started.
Course Design
The first thing to tackle was the course design, working with some local partners, I created an outline of the course with learning objectives, activities, and so on. My initial course design involved some group work, a range of exercises to encourage engagement with the topic from different points of view, and a few creative and open ended exercises. Whilst this probably would have been good in a university seminar room, I received feedback that the ex-combatants were used to a didactic military style of instruction.
The initial plan that I designed also made it hard to quantitatively assess the learning outcomes of participants, as several of the exercises were subjective and open-ended in nature, making it hard to grade them without being an expert in the topic yourself. Because I wasn’t able to travel to Colombia, it was important that the project could evaluate learners quickly and without being experts in remote sensing or forest monitoring themselves. Ultimately, this led me to re-design the course to be less pedagogically interesting, but easier to deploy in the context of the training; where the information was delivered didactically and the learners assessed with a series of multiple choice question quizzes. I designed several videos which served as standalone lessons, where I would deliver the content alongside slides, or show how to the deforestation monitoring tools step by step in a video tutorial style. After each ‘class’, the learners would be asked to complete a quiz which would assess their learning and track their progress.
There was a bit of a language gap in the presentation, my Spanish is not particularly good but I was the only member of the team familiar with these remote sensing technologies. In the end, we created Spanish language written materials (my written Spanish is much stronger) and I narrated the videos in English but provided subtitles.
Understanding Perspectives
As part of the learning process, we designed a number of deforestation maps using remote sensing data for the areas that the project team would be visiting, showing deforestation in the learners’ local communities. This was both to demonstrate the potential of deforestation monitoring, and enable the project team to talk with the learners about their personal experiences and stories of the forest, and how it has changed. The idea here was to create an object which could be used to relate the personal experiences of learners to the data produced by remote sensing satellites.
To do this, I needed to:
- Find the locations of the ex combatant’s communities on a map, which was challenging as they weren’t always officially marked
- Use Google Earth Engine to generate forest cover change maps for these areas, using a recent high resolution satellite image as a basemap
- Prepare these for print on A3 paper, overlaying Open Street Map markers, and add a scale bar and compass.
The idea was that these maps would serve both as a demonstration of what is possible with satellite data, and a prompt for qualitative data collection and some participatory mapping with the participants.
These maps also served as a touchpoint in the training, which asked participants to recall the possible benefits and pitfalls of safeguarding biodiversity in their own area. Through discussing examples of ecotourism and carbon credits, which in the latter case can sometimes be exploitative of local communities, the power of a map is contextualised in the political life of the participants rather than simply serving as a prop to demonstrate the power of cartography.
Free Tools
Because of the aforementioned lack of computers and reliable internet connection, we needed to train the participants in tools which could be used with a relatively small amount of bandwidth, and which were accessible from mobile phones.
For this purpose, I decided to focus the training on how to use Global Forest Watch’s online platform, which provides free tools to monitor areas over time, share analysis, and understand historical trends. Global forest watch also uses a reactive web app to display the data that you query, and can integrate with social media and other platforms, which speaks to the potential uses of the forest monitoring as both an advocacy tool and means of advertising ecotourism.
Summary
This was an interesting and challenging project to work on, and I learned a lot by doing so, in particular that:
- It is important to fit delivery style to the needs of your audience, even if this means using a method of delivery which is not ‘best practice’
- Ease of access to technology is an important factor in designing training, and if you don’t understand what technology your audience has access to, it might be useless. Sometimes, a low-tech and more basic approach is better.
- The political dimensions of technology are important to consider and communicate when providing training, particularly to vulnerable populations.
Thank you for reading this summary of the training I helped develop for the Peace with Nature project. The challenges of designing training and educational materials for outside the university or corporate training course are complex, but often not well documented, so I hope this contributes in a small way to others working in the same field.
