Environmental+sustainability+on-line

Project Summary
Great Gardens is a Perth-based business providing environmental sustainability knowledge and strategies to urban and rural land owners across Western Australia. The Great Gardens program runs workshops showing people how to plan their gardens, save time and money, attract native wildlife, control pests responsibly and respect the local environment. The major issue for Great Gardens was that demand for the workshops greatly exceeded delivery resources, plus there were people from outside the Perth area who would have loved to tap into the 'waterwise' and 'fertiliserwise' ways of the Great Gardens team - but couldn't. The second part of the Great Gardens dilemma was a lack of connection to the 25,000 participants that had attended the workshops previously. The e-learning solution allowed the delivery team to extend workshops to more members of the community as well as providing post-workshop resources for participants. The Great Gardens team developed a website featuring an online booking system which updates places remaining at workshops. The data collected via this system can be downloaded to Excel and imported to email lists. This e-business application will form the basis of their emerging social network. Workshops were engaging and exciting as participants in workshops were able to trigger information and video on big screens using Learning Table and RFID technology. Online social networking will be used in 2009 as a means of connecting with the 25,000 participants that had attended the workshops previously. The Great Gardens team had no experience of e-learning prior to this project. The project achieved: The Australian Flexible Learning Framework has benefited through the application of e-learning strategies (some of which were Framework- developed resources) to a business that provides community based learning. Large numbers of community members have had access to online content and participated in Sustainability workshops as a result of this project.
 * Efficient time management through use of content in multiple applications
 * Varied strategies for delivery and distribution of content
 * Increased engagement of the stakeholders
 * Expanded access to audience through online enrolment and distribution of content.

**Project website**
[|Great Gardens]

**For more information**
Stephen McVey Director Skills Strategies International steve@skillstrategies.net

Phone: (07) 3307 4700 Email: enquiries@flexiblelearning.net.au Website: [|flexiblelearning.net.au]
 * For more information on the Australian Flexible Learning Framework:**