Lots of thought and consultation led to the development of online learning at the Permaculture Association. We want to create a thriving platform that places quality educators at its centre.

 

Creating this online platform feeds into all of our charitable education work:

  • Reach more people with permaculture 
  • Support learners to see permaculture in practice through the LAND network. 
  • Improve our membership offering 
  • Increase financial security for educators by offering income 
  • Support key skills sharing for educators, especially learning new technologies to get online
  • Generate funds and support for valuable permaculture education projects through the Fair Shares Fund
  • Showcase the amazing work our network does!
  • Create additional revenue to:

    • Give more time to better support educators 

    • Increase marketing budget for permaculture courses

    • Create better education events

    • Provide a budget to pay a diversity of speakers for events and on courses

 

Collaboration 

We highlight the amazing work of our educators throughout our courses, supporting learners to choose the best permaculture educators for them on their learning journey. 

Many educators agreed to be video interviewed and offered resources, helping to explain permaculture concepts from their unique perspectives, in turn highlighting their awesome work. We link directly to the featured educators' own websites - to where they sell and promote their courses and strongly encourage learners to go on to study with them after finishing the course. We have been criticised by some learners for the amount of encouragement to go on to study further and to purchase books our educators wrote, but this is central to our educational aims. 

By working with educators using zoom calls since 2018, we have developed solid relationships. We meet regularly, sharing valuable learning around online courses and often review the idea of competition. The Education Working Group (EWG) have met to discuss how we can best collaborate several times.

 

How COVID-19 changed things 

In March 2020, online learning suddenly became even more important. Now nearly all our educators were being forced to move online.

We ended up being delayed by 1 month because of the pandemic, mostly to give us time to respond to the needs of our educators, who needed more support than anticipated. Many educators wanted information on using our platform fairly and most needed skilling up in online technology which our Education Lead supported them with via their regular online meetings.

That delay would have been longer if it wasn’t for the support from the CoLab (link needed) and its work supporting international permaculture networks.

 

Teacher Led Courses

Educator income was badly affected during the pandemic and we wanted to provide financial support to our network. Through consultation with educators and the EWG we decided to prioritise teacher-led courses. This meant generating income for teachers, who would provide remote sessions to small groups of learners. 

We managed to launch these during the 2020 pandemic and we continue to work and collaborate to make this fair and easy. 

 

Fair Shares Fund

We have created a Fair Shares fund for permaculture education. We put money in this fund from our profits every time we run a teacher led version of our Design For Resilience course. 

We hope to provide equitable opportunities for education, for our Educator members and our education community.

Each teacher led course has a set fee per learner with a maximum of 20 learners per course. Wherever we have more than 14 students on a course, we make a small profit for the charity. We may not make a profit on every course, but every time we do, we promise to put aside 10% to the Fair Shares fund. 

The Fund is accessible to all Educator members of the Permaculture Association, and they will become what we call a "Commons". This means that in future the "Commoners" (or educator members) can manage this fund transparently, putting in proposals to spend this money. There is currently over £1000 in the fund as of July 2020.

 

Pricing our Courses 

A lot of research went into the pricing strategy before the launch. We could make the course much cheaper as they are delivered online, but after consultation with the educators we priced our courses to more closely match face to face courses.

 

Bursary Places 

We want to offer free and discounted places to those most in need of support, who wouldn't be able to afford to pay to take a permaculture course with teachers in our network. 

At times we will offer bursary places to learners, this is in part due to pricing our courses to not outcompete our teachers, generating income we wish to give back to those in need. This is because equity, accessibility and reach are central to our aims as a permaculture education charity. 

Therefore we are not competing with educators by providing places to those who wouldn't be able to afford to pay. 

We will seek funding to support all marginalised communities over time and are open to suggestions of how best to do this with the permaculture community and educators network in mind. 

 

“Making permaculture accessible is literally our number one priority. Online learning allows us to reach people that can't access local courses or need to be able to learn in a much more flexible way.” 

 

Andy Goldring, CEO, 

Permaculture Association

Photo: Andy Goldring

 

 

Feedback 

If you are an educator member, please get in touch if you would like to discuss any of the above. We are dedicated to making our educational offerings as fair and transparent as possible. Contact [email protected]