Introduction
When you have completed this course, we believe that you will be a competent facilitator of 'The AIDS Competence Process'. We have introduced our process to communities around the world and they have used it on their journey to AIDS Competence. AIDS Competence is the place or 'state' where individuals, groups and communities are able to deal with the threats and challenges that the AIDS pandemic presents. They have also used our process to learn from the experiences of other communities and to share their own experiences with other communities. When you have completed this programme, we hope that you will want to work with us so that AIDS Competence can spread around the world more quickly than the virus.
Who we are: a short introduction to the Constellation for AIDS Competence ('The Constellation') and the Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine.
The Constellation for AIDS Competence is a not-for-profit organisation incorporated in Belgium in April 2005. You will learn a lot more about what we do during this programme, but you can always get more information about us and about who we are working with from our website at www.aidscompetence.org.
The 12 founding members of the Constellation come from a wide variety of backgrounds (industry, the academic world, religion as well as The Red Cross, UNFPA and UNAIDS). What unites this diverse group is a conviction, based on experience, that the conventional approaches to the AIDS pandemic were not going to the root of the problem. More money and more technology were not the answer. The communities and the countries that had made progress against HIV/AIDS had provided commodities, but they had also recognised that people had the capacity to respond appropriately and effectively to threats to their well-being. The role of the Constellation is to stimulate, to support and to connect Local Responses around the world and during this Programme, you will learn how we do that.
The Constellation has developed this programme thanks to the expertise and support of the Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine, based in Tromsø, North Norway. The Norwegian Centre for Telemedicine (NST) is a research and development centre at the University Hospital of North Norway. The NST develops and hosts a wide variety of internet based programmes.
The NST and the Constellation gratefully acknowledge the support of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign affairs for this work.
How the Blended Learning Programme works
Perhaps the fundamental assumption of the Constellation is that the experiences of individuals and communities can be the basis for effective action against many of the challenges that they face. Our own experience tells us that this process of learning is driven:
- by reflection on those experiences and
- by learning from the experiences of others and
- by sharing your experiences with others
The Blended Learning Programme is unusual in that it is based on these principles. During the programme we will be asking you to read and to understand some material, but our hope is that this will not be a large burden for most people. But at the heart of the programme is a series of visits (that we call SALT visits) to communities during which you will introduce the Constellation process to those communities. It is by reflecting on these experiences, both as an individual and as a member of a SALT team, that you will deepen your understanding of our process.
A second guiding principle of the Constellation is that we work as a team, rather than as individuals. The idea is that during the programme, the members of the course will form a team and you will learn and share together as a team. During the programme, we will ask you to take part in a variety of discussions where you reflect on questions that we ask or on experiences that you have had. We want to emphasise that this is not an optional extra part of the course. It is a one of the very important ways that you will learn and share together as a team.
The Structure of the Blended Learning Programme
There are 6 Modules in the Blended Learning Programme (in addition to this introduction).
In Module 1, we introduce the concept of Local Response. This is the idea that people and groups can and do respond to the challenges that they face. This is not our idea. We, and lots of other people, have seen it happening all over the world. In some ways this module is optional. If your own experiences have persuaded you of the power of Local Response, then you can read through the material fairly quickly and perhaps you will find some examples of Local Response that you haven't come across before. However, if you find yourself challenging this idea then you will find more material that will let you explore the examples in more detail. But there is no doubt that Local Response is the basis of what we do and the rest of this programme is about how we stimulate, support and transfer Local Response around the world.
Module 2 is about our 'Way of Thinking and Way of Working'. This is the most important module in the Blended Learning Programme. In this module, we introduce you to the background thinking that we bring to our approach. The particular way in which we stimulate Local Response evolves as we learn from our own experiences. But our Way of Thinking and our Way of Working are much more resistant to change; they are the heart of everything that we do. In fact, we believe that these ideas are so important that in all of the remaining modules, you will find a section called 'Our Way of Thinking and our Way of Working' where we ask you to reflect on this topic in a variety of ways that we hope that you will find entertaining. (This section can be done at any time in the module; all of the other sections are sequential.)
In modules 3,4,5 and 6 (see the diagram above), we step through the AIDS Competence Process. This process helps a community to think about a challenge in a structured way so that they can decide on the actions that they need to take to address a challenge, in this case HIV/AIDS.
The organisation of the modules
The organisation of all of the modules is very similar..
As you work your way through each module there are 2 main phases. In the first phase, you will learn about a particular step in our process. So, for example, in Module 4, you will learn about the 'Self Assessment Framework'. There will be exercises to help you to understand the different parts of the framework, you will discuss issues and you will complete the Self Assessment Framework as a team for your team. In the second part of the module, the challenge is to faciliate a group or community as it goes through the process of completing the Self Assessment framework. You will do this twice and both before and your challenge is to learn as much as possible from these visits by reflecting on them.
As we mentioned above, in each module there is a section on our Way of Thinking and our Way of Working that will make you think about these ideas in a variety of ways. You will find that our Way of Working and our Way of Thinking will influence every step in our process.
