Changing Public Behavior: People and the Environment

Purpose

As you delve into course materials and activities, you will learn how to increase people's involvement in environmental stewardship and management by using social assessment techniques to investigate your audience, and applying results to select effective outreach or education strategies.

In this course you will:

• Build skills and confidence in identifying and analyzing opportunities for changing behaviors that affect natural resources stewardship and management

• Draft a plan for increasing citizen involvement, for an environmental situation you are working on

Organization

The Changing Public Behavior course is presented in 8 Units. In each Unit you will find 3 - 8 Lessons, and from 3 to 12 activities.

Each Lesson segment is a paragraph to a page in length. As a result, there are many lessons and activities, but each is relatively short, and is designed to be accomplished within a limited time-frame. This structure allows the learner to stop and start as time permits.

Completing the work, activities, and required readings for the entire course should take about 30-40 hours.

Units 4 and 5 include the bulk of the course content and will require more time to complete than other Units, especially if this is your first introduction to behavior theories. 

Unit 7 also includes a lot of content, illustrating how to use information about individual needs and interests to develop an effective education or outreach initiative. 

The other Units are relatively short, but worth the time as they build skills useful for later Units.

You can reduce course time by Assessing your Skills in Questionnaire 1.4, and itemizing a Personal Education Plan that focuses only on the skills you need (Assignment 1.4).

You may also prefer to skim through the course once, then return later to selected lessons to check your understanding, and use the activities as a way to hone your skills.

While the course outline is relatively easy to see from the main course page or the navigation bar on the right, you may find it helpful to print the outline as a guide for the course.

The outline is organized by Unit

And shows the Lesson titles and description, activity titles, and Unit assessment criteria.

HINT: Words in bold blue are links to course resources (except in this example, of course).

Enjoy the course!