Friday, January 02, 2009

e-Learning Course on Green ICT Strategies: Part 13 - More Pragmatism

In Part 12 I discovered I had scheduled two week sevens as part of preparing a new e-learning course on "Green IT Strategies", to be offered as part of the ACS Computer Professional Education Program. Having merged some of the topics so I had the required number of weeks for the course I got on with preparing the remaining content. This became progressively more difficult as I got to the more esoteric topics, such as quality management and auditing.

Also I asked my colleagues at the ANU to check the course details, which they proceeded to do in forensic detail. They found several errors in the first sentence. By the time they got to the end of the first paragraph I started to regret asking for comment, but these were all useful suggestions.

One frustration was that some of the standards used for ICT and environmental purposes are formal ISO ones. As a result the text of the standards are not freely available, ISO and its national counterparts, such as Standards Australia, sell copies of the standards. These standards are therefore not freely available online. There are many references to the standards, but little of use for students trying to understand them.

Another frustration continues to be material which is freely available, but in large PDF files. The Australian Government has provided the full text of a proposed Draft National Carbon Offset Standard, but it is tacked on the end of a discussion document in a PDF file.

However, hopefully many of those frustrations are now behind me. The revised Green ICT Strategies Course Outline is done, along with twelve weeks of content, two assignments and readings.

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