With the recent unveiling of Regenerative Leadership Institute's free online Permaculture Design course, many of us have elected to form small groups to meet together to watch and discuss these lectures by Larry Korn (translator of One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka). We've also shared ideas on how to incorporate these lectures with hands on projects, which could include taking turns helping those in our small group with their own permaculture projects.
Without detracting from this valuable resource and generous offering, some concerns have been expressed over the teaching style of this particular course, which may seem disorganized to our Western brains, although it may accommodate some people's learning styles without any hangups. The challenge, therefore, is to come up with a way to work with multiple learning styles that will also lend itself to a group setting. To the best of my knowledge, the most organized outline for a PDC is the one from Permaculture's own cofounder, Bill Mollison in Permaculture: A Designer's Manual,, the textbook from which many PDC's condense and excerpt from. Below is an illustration (start from the bottom) of the intuitive flow in the organization of his subject matter that stood out to me after perusing the table of contents.
So maybe to use an outline like this, we could take each unit (the bubbles with the numbers) and create multimedia lists of recommended reading, viewing and hands on projects including, but not limited to, the free online course lectures. These lists could be posted and continuously updated online (maybe on this blog) and each student taking the course could fill out logs for each educational activity pertaining to a unit, also including bits chosen for their own self study. Below is an example, complete with true-to-life mistakes. :) And fictional scenarios.
