🏠Home | 📁 OPEN WORKS database | ✏️ Formats and delivery models | 🗺️ What skills do we need? | 📋 Definitions | 🌐 Insights | ➕ Get involved | 💡 About this project
Open Learning is a broad term which describes learning which is ‘open’ in terms of timing, location, teaching roles, instructional methods, modes of access, and any other factors related to learning processes. It offers learners the opportunity to learn together in the real world and widens their horizons to learn from people other than traditional teachers, tutors or instructors.
Place-Based Learning situates learning in the context of real places and communities. It draws on the social, environmental, material and economic resources and realities of a specific location to make learning relevant and resonant. By connecting people, ideas and action in a real world, it fosters relationships, understanding, agency and responsibility for the places we live and work in.
Learning Ecosystems are partnerships, networks or communities where different kinds of learning opportunities - from education or training providers, workplaces, libraries, online courses, and community activities - are connected, creating rich, personalised, and diverse learning pathways that adapt to each individual's goals and needs.
Participatory methods help people play an active part in decisions which affect their lives. Involving community members in working together solutions for climate change through the use of participatory methods is key. Working with people from the outset helps surface their perspectives, develop better thinking, and build shared understanding. It also strengthens local capacity by creating knowledge, relationships and networks that can keep working beyond specific projects.
Community Connected Learning is an experiential approach where learners work with real partners on real issues, applying theory to practical situations. It draws on a rich tradition of place-based education, youth social action, service learning and global citizenship. At the core of CCL are approaches that help to deepen learners’ understanding of the world around them, while learning how to change it for the better.
Place-based education is a powerful local approach to education for environmental justice and climate action. By rooting learning experiences in contexts that are immediately relevant to participants, the climate crisis becomes more immediately relevant too and the responses more sustainable. Actions drive beliefs.
From Open Learning to Learning Ecosystems to Participatory Methods, all share principles that work so well for climate learning because they pull the issue out of abstraction and ground it in the places people actually live, work or explore. They start local, making climate impacts and solutions tangible allowing to scale understanding all the way up to the global picture. All meet learners where they are, aim to lower barriers to learning and tap into what feels relevant and motivating.