Teachers Training Program on Climate Change - India

The Teachers Training Program on Climate Change is designed to give teachers confidence in facilitating climate change and sustainability education inside and outside the classroom. The project enables teachers to help young people understand the causes and consequences of climate change, bring about changes in attitudes and behaviours to reduce the severity of future climate change and build resilience in the face of climate change.

Fast facts:

Trained more than 500 teachers from over 170 schools, including Mayo, Sanskriti, Sriram, Vasant Valley, Modern, Banyan Tree, Delhi Public School among others across India.
Worked with Delhi government to train its teachers.

The problem

India has a population of 1.2 billion people and an in-school youth population of over 500 million. It is necessary that students learn about climate change and how to adopt more sustainable ways of living. Reaching all 500 million students through traditional means would be very expensive and would require a large carbon footprint.

The solution

This activity uses an online training methodology to disseminate climate change information. The solution has been developed in the form of an open source learning management system called Moodle that provides professional development to teachers of various backgrounds to enable them to integrate climate change content into their lessons. The training content consists of videos, animations, articles and quizzes. Skype is used extensively to connect with teachers and give advice when needed. The program is available to teachers and their students through via computers, iPads, tablets and smartphones.

Helping the planet

This activity is changing attitudes towards energy use and awareness of carbon footprints, and training a whole generation of young people to be environmentally conscious citizens.

Helping people

The beneficiaries of the program are primarily schools. Due to the wide reach of the Internet, both poor and rich schools are able to share the same high quality content.

Scaling Up

The content is developed centrally to maintain quality but can be distributed widely over the Internet. The number of servers and bandwidth can be increased if demand increases. Regarding content scalability, 80% of the content is the same for any country, but 20% needs individual customization. The program can be translated into multiple languages, which can be easily accomplished in Delhi where translators are easily accessible.