Course Format
All IISD online courses are organized in a seminar format with weekly readings, presentations and assignments along with discussion among participants. While participants are not required to access the courses at specific times it will be necessary to access the course at least two or more times each week to download assignments, post reactions, and give feedback to other course participants.

Materials
All content and readings requried for IISD courses will be downloadabe from within the online course or linked to from the course. Particpants will not be required to purchase any additional materials.

Grading
All IISD online courses are non-credit but are graded on a Pass/Fail basis. The criteria for passing or failing will be determined by each instructor and should be clearly explained in the course syllabus or course description. Following the completion of each course, students will be mailed a letter indicating their grade which should be retained for your records.

To be awarded the Certificate in Community-Based Development students must pass the required course, Approaches to Community-Based Development along with four (4) other elective courses in the program.

Academic Credit
CEUs or Professional Development Units (PDUs) are awarded for participation. Each CEU represents 10 hours of instruction; a PDU represents one hour of instruction. These units are respected in many industries as proof of commitment to continuous learning and accepted for recertification requirements as a measure of in-service activities in professional fields.

CEUs and PDUs do not, however, count toward a degree nor are they recorded on an official transcript.

Technical Requirements
IISD online trainings are based on the Blackboard (TM) system. The minimum requirements to use this system include the following:

• Mozilla Firefox Version 2.0 or later OR MS Internet Explorer version 6.0 or later.
• Cookies are enabled
• Javascript is enabled
• Pop-up blocker is turned off
• Java 2 Runtime Environment version 1.6.0_03 (Sun Microsystems Inc.)

To test to determine if your browser is compatible click here.

Additionally, many IISD courses share documents using the freely available Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you don't have a reader installed you can download one for free at http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html