Abstract:

Waste Management is one of the major environmental problems in the Philippines. The Ecological Solid Waste Management Act was enacted in 2001 and it specifically gives local government units (LGUs) a vital role in the implementation of the act at the community level. The LGUs in the Philippines is composed of 81 provinces, 144 cities and 1,490 municipalities.

However, more than 10 years has passed since the law was enacted but it can be said that there is a low compliance on the policy with still a lot of LGUs having no approved Solid Waste Management Plan (SWM) in their respective locality. The Department of Environment and Natural Resources- Environment Management Bureau (DENR-EMB), despite constraints in resources has been providing financial and technical assistance to the LGUs in order to implement the policy. It has identified priority cities to train, but despite the efforts, many cities even located in the capital have no approved plans. This can be attributed to some factors such as: lack of capacity to prepare the plan and lack of human and financial resources.

In order to address these challenges, the DENR-EMB and the University of the Philippines Open University (UPOU) has agreed to jointly offer an e-learning course on solid Waste Management. This will enable more LGUs to be trained at a more affordable cost with wider reach all over the Philippines. The course was also designed in response to the call of implement training courses with lesser carbon footprint.

This paper aims to present the experiences of the E-Course on Solid Waste Management. Specifically, it aims to :
a) identify the course objectives;
b) present the learning and teaching methods of the course;
c) present how the online course was managed; and
d) identify the challenges and opportunities for the future.

Keywords:

e-learning for Environmental Management.