 The course that we offered was called the Climate Change Science and Modeling of Biophysical and Economic Impacts. So the first thing is why have a course on climate change? Well as we saw and why we're all here, there's a lot of funds that are being given to developing countries and not only developing countries, it's happening in developed countries as well to include climate change in their analyses, both from a biophysical aspect and an economic aspect. And we saw in the Plenary session this morning how Miko put up the slide of the IPCC and showed, oh, everybody knows this background, we'll move on. Well, we might know the surface of climate change, but when we're an economist or an agronomist coming, we know our field very well, but when we want to try to do climate change on top of that, do we really know the nuts and bolts on how to do a good analysis? So the researchers don't actually have the proper background to perform a good analysis to incorporate climate change. So there's a need out there for concise and relevant information from well-respected researchers. So now why would we want to do an online course? We want to reach a large number of participants and we want to gather the top experts in the different fields to provide the lectures, so it would be very difficult and expensive to gather all these experts at the same time and then also gather all of the participants that were looking at taking the course from around the world in one location. So we want to create a course or a format that can be updated with the science that's changing all the time and use multiple times. Now at first we were struck with a lot of concerns and skepticism about offering an online course or the online format. The first thing people think about are the technical issues, especially in developing countries. How do we deal with internet connections, software issues and computer issues in developing countries or anywhere? And then how about how are the participants really going to learn online and what about their ability to connect with other people when they're not physically there and connect with the instructors? So one thing we did was we spent a lot of time researching online courses and we consulted with professionals that is their job to do online education and what's the best way to run an online course. So they helped us figure out how to really engage the participants. It's important to engage the participant to participant relationship, also the participant to the material relationship and then the participant to the instructor relationship. So focus on how are we going to make those work. And then the course material, how to make it in an online format easy to deal with. How do we deal with the internet issues? We set up FTP sites, use different formats like you send it files, drop boxes. And then we also sent out DVDs of the course material in advance of the course starting so that there wouldn't be any hangups with the participants having access to the material. We also evaluated many different learning platforms. There's a lot of different platforms out there. We decided to go with the Blackboard course sites. Blackboard is a well-respected online learning format that's used in many universities. And they have created a course sites version which is a little bit downscaled from what the universities use but it's free to nonprofits and it just really fit perfect with what our needs were. The other aspect about having an online course was the ability to use multiple experts instead of just having one instructor stand up and lecture about all of the different fields. So just a little bit more on the experts versus one instructor. The issue with climate change is that it's really changing all the time. The science behind it, it's being improved upon and there's more topics and issues coming up. And there's different views and also biases out there. So we want to make sure that we're addressing both sides of the issue. So instead of having just one instructor that kind of gives an overview of the different aspects we really wanted to have an expert in each one of the fields that could provide the latest thoughts and ideas that were out there on that specific subject in terms of climate change. And then we would also have an instructor or a course facilitator that would aid the participants through their discussions and help them with the consistency of the course making sure that their issues with any technical issues were being addressed at the same time. So we did gather a great number of experts. A number from, I'll kind of go through this quickly, but a number from MIT, Adam Schlosser did the climate science, Kerry Manuel looked at cyclones and extreme events. We had a sea level rise expert, Ken Stresbeck, who will be here later today, looked at the waterside, hydrology, floods, droughts, water resources. We had Paul Chinowski with the infrastructure modeling, looking at roads and other infrastructure. Channing Arnt from Union Wider with crop modeling. Sherman Robinson from IFPRI that did the CGE and the partial equilibrium modeling. We had Rob Davis contribute to the market failures and the discounting. And then James Thurlow look at the country-level economic modeling. So the course was built on four weeks for an online course that was used to address the current science and also the thoughts on climate change and its biophysical and economic implications. We were created this course for professionals that were working in the different disciplines and that were being faced with addressing the climate change in their work. Our goal is to provide a core knowledge of the good climate science and then also the best modeling practices. Our material included a list of readings, lectures, discussions, and then also a small final group project. The first part of the course, the first week of the course, was at the climate system, which included the evidence and skepticism of climate change, climate change scenarios, both from the social and emission scenarios, as well as the global circulation models, their output, their reliability, the issue of downscaling, and what do we do with these projections? How can we use them in our analyses? The second part then, built upon that climate system background and looked at the biophysical impacts of climate change, included the modeling of hydrology, floods and droughts, crop modeling, water resources modeling, and then also infrastructure modeling. And then the conclusion the last week of the course looked at the economics impacts. So we looked at greenhouse gas emissions, market failures, discounts, mitigation, the CGE and PE models, and also the country-level economic modeling. We'll talk about this a little bit later too, but the first group, for example, had about 30 participants. So in order to make a more intimate feel between the participants so that they were getting to work with each other and actually learning from each other, we divided the participants up to a number of groups. They're about three to five participants in each group. We divided them up based on their geographic location. And then from these groups is where they actually did their discussions. So there would be another number of discussion questions from each topic that they had to write about. So they would go to their discussion groups, these smaller groups, and write their discussions. And then they also would comment on each other's post of what they thought about the discussion questions. And then also it was with this small group that they completed a small final group project that they decided to do based on what they learned in the course. In order to complete the course, the participants had to answer all the discussion questions in their small discussion group. And then they also had to comment on at least one to two other participant posts. So this helped to keep the discussions flowing. And they also had to complete the final group project at the end. Now I just have a few slides to kind of show you what it looked like, what the course website looks like. And we also have some of the students here, so in the end they might be able to shed some light on what their thoughts on the course were too. But we tried to keep it simple and easy to navigate through. So when you first came, you were welcome to, this is the home page, and we had announcements that would pop up based on the time of the, where we were at in the course and also a calendar that showed where we were at and what was due next. For example, with the welcome announcement, we had a welcoming them to the course, and then we had videos, one from Channing Art on behalf of You and You Wider, that welcomed them to the course and kind of said what You and You Wider's perspective was. And then one from Innocent Machu, who you'll hear about in just a moment, who also welcomed to the course the ERC perspective on the course. So the course was simple with the home page. There was also the ability with an instant messenger, so you could instant message with other participants as well as the instructor when they were online. There was bios and backgrounds of each of the experts that we had. The course content was the main meat of the course, where we had all of our assignments organized under each folder, each of the topics. We also had a course resources section where we had additional material, because as you can imagine, there's quite a bit of information out there and we tried to condense this down into three weeks of actual material, four weeks with just the setting up of the course and getting them used to the course. And also we had links to other websites. If there were participants that had done a paper or had other information, we would put it in this location as well. Access to data and things like that would be under our course resources. Then we had the discussion sections. That was discussions where you could see discussions, the whole group could see it. So this is different from the smaller groups discussion. But if you had questions about the topic for a specific expert, you could go to this location and write your question and everybody could see the question that was asked. And then we would have the experts come online and answer those questions. And then we had the smaller groups where they would go in and do their discussion question answers. So here's a look at just one of the pages. This is an example of the topic, Climate Change Science by Adam Schlosser. Who's here? The first started off with an introduction video. So this just gave them the ability to see the expert that was giving the lecture. It gave them a background of what they've done and also what they were going to cover in their topic. Then we had a list of required readings that they were required to read. And then we had the actual presentations and the presentations were presented as voice over PowerPoints. So they actually had the lecture talking over the slides so they could see them. And we divided them up into 15-minute sections so that one, easier to download their file size. And two, just kind of help divide up the material in a digestible way. And in addition, what we're going to add in the next session is self-assessment quizzes, which we'll look at just true and false and multiple-choice questions that will hit the highlights of the readings and the lectures. And then we have the list of questions, the group discussion questions. And these are different from a true or false or multiple-choice question, and they're trying to get the participants to think a little further. It might be a question that's, how does this relate to your location, to issues in your country, so that they could actually try to think outside the box what they are needing to do, and either their discipline and also their location. The discussion boards that I mentioned were set up like any discussion board that you see online, where you would just post your answer to the discussion question or your question for the expert, and then somebody else could see that and they would come in and comment on it, and then it would just start a dialogue. And then all of these discussions were then kept and archived so that the participants could see other groups' answers and discussions too, which just led to more learning. And also the course instructor or moderator would be reading and going over these to make sure that they were staying on course and that somebody didn't have quite a wild idea or could comment to make sure that they were digesting the material correctly. So lastly, what do participants get from this course? They get the latest information and ideas on climate change from the leading experts in the different disciplines. And then they get access to all the papers and the lectures that were used to use in their own teaching and their own research. And then they learn also where to get the data and further information that wasn't covered, because as I mentioned, there's a lot of data and information out there on climate change. And they also get to gain new colleagues through the group discussion boards and their group projects. And then they get the access to a network of past graduates of the course, which has been useful to see what other people are doing. And then at the end, they also get a certificate of participation. So again, the idea behind this is to get them the scientific background. You know, for one example, if you're going to go do an analysis, is it better to use just one scenario and do it very detailed or should you be using a multiple number of scenarios? So these type of questions can aid these scientists and researchers in how they're going about doing an analysis with climate change involved. So now I'm going to turn it over to Innocent Machi, who's going to give the AERC perspective and a little bit of the response from the participants as well.