Abstract:

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is a non-profit institution dedicated to education and research on urban development, the built environment, and tax policy in the United States and abroad. Through research, training, conferences, demonstration projects, publications, and multi-media, the Institute provides the highest quality, non-partisan analysis and evaluation for today's regulatory, planning, and policy decisions.
Providing high-quality education and research, the Institute strives to improve public dialogue and decisions about land policy.

Since 2004, the Lincoln Institute has developed distance education courses on topics related to urban development. In Latin America the challenge in the educational area is enormous. With approximately 15,000 municipalities in the region, the definition of a distance education strategy to enrich the people was crucial. In the scope of the Program on Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), 9 moderated courses are offered: Multipurpose Cadastres in Defining Urban Land Policies; Geographic Information Systems (GIS) Applications for Urban Studies; Property Tax and Real Estate Valuation; Urban Land Markets in Latin American Cities; Urban Land as a Source of Financing in Latin American Cities; Access to Urban Land by/for the Poor in Latin America; Legal Dimensions of Land Policies; Real Estate Property Assessment Techniques; and Land Management Tools for Land Market Analysis. These courses are free; however, participants are selected through a competitive application process every semester. The selected groups, of 45 participants each, normally include at least one representative from each of the 19 countries of the region.

Each course lasts 7 weeks, with one professor responsible for each week. The courses are set up on the Moodle platform, which has had excellent results in terms of performance and usability. The main tools used are: the discussion forum, quizzes (for self evaluation) and tasks, which consist of brief reports related to the topic of each week. The professors grade the reports and at the end of the course the participants receive a certificate from the Lincoln Institute.

Given that the demand for online courses has increased every year; the LAC Program started to develop self-paced courses using different platforms and multimedia materials,
always working with free software.

Exploration into video-based education began in 2007. Video classes are being used in both online and in-classroom courses. They are uploaded on the Institute’s Web site. These products are being adapted as downloadable files, especially for NGOs, small cities, and educational institutions which cannot show the video classes online during their training activities.

More recently, the Lincoln Institute started to translate online courses developed by its different thematic departments in English to Spanish and Portuguese. This decision implies the extraction of the professor’s presentation from the video class; editing; translation and dubbing in the target language. The final edition puts together the dubbed video with the translated PowerPoint slides, creating a new product. This process is time and resources consuming, but has incremented exponentially the use of quality video classes that have already been developed.

Keywords:

land policy, urban land, latin america.