Lessons learned

The majority of the 66 participants in the four courses were living in developing countries. TNU and IRC invested a considerable amount of time and effort into developing and marketing the Internet course on Institutional changes in Urban Water and Sanitation. However, only a minority paid the course fee. If they did, they were sponsored by a project or a donor. So far, the fees paid have not brought in sufficient money to recover these costs. This means that IRC and TNU have sponsored participants as well.

Participants to this course evaluated positively the price/value in comparison to face-to-face conferences. Compared with a three-day international conference on the same topic participants responded that such a conference would be much more expensive, and less effective. Another big advantage reported was "that one can fill gaps in planning etc. by logging on to the course at times suitable to the participants".

Compared with an international face-to-face course participants liked the online concept. "It is always good to get to know people face to face, but through the Forum and Profiles contacts can be established anyway. This is more efficient. Cost of travel would outweigh the cost of this entire course. Interaction in a face-to-face course may be more, but given the spread in time (3 weeks) of this course, much more is absorbed".

Originally TNU and IRC agreed that the course would be canceled if we didn't have six paying participants. In the practice of the first four courses we have incurred losses, but these have been accepted as investing in learning of IRC staff in innovative electronic learning, which is an important strategic area of IRC's core business. But after the fourth course and as result of its new 2002 - 2006 business planning IRC could no longer invest in this EDL course, and discussed how to proceed, see under new context: E-learning below.

We also had to look at the competition in the market in international electronic distance learning. We found that:

1. Costs of the development of the few existing internet-based training courses on water are very high (e.g. two persons nearly full time working for two years on European real time collaboration between university students on river basins), and

2. participants either pay nothing for their participation, or if they do, not more than US$ 100, see IW LEARN below.

We now feel that this kind of quality course can only be maintained at a price, unless a donor would pick up the development, running and course fee of internet courses such as this one. Or if it can be linked with a university programme where students get credit points for participating and the university gets subsidies for students. The World Bank Institute and the GEF- funded International Waters: LEARN programme for instance charges participants only US$ 100 for their combined Internet and video conferencing course programmes in selected developing countries. Their development costs and running costs are paid from the donor headquarters and country offices. They also select the participants.