NEW STRATEGIES FOR LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE ENHANCEMENT IN THE FIELD OF NATURAL HAZARDS: THE EXPERIENCE OF THE E-LEARNING TOOL OF THE EUROPEAN RESEARCH PROJECT ENSURE

The essay offers a synthesis of the activities developed into the ENSURE European project in order to build the planned e-learning tool.
The basic assumption of ENSURE is that our ability to better understand and evaluate different types of vulnerabilities and resilience to hazards constitutes a crucial tool to strengthen communities in the face of disasters due to extreme events and climate change. Improving the understanding of the factors that make a community more vulnerable from the one hand and more resilient from the other is therefore extremely important.
Into such a framework, the e-learning tool has been regarded as a new learning and knowledge strategy for achieving two main goals. The first one is a dissemination of the project results in a learning viewpoint, which enclose the proposal for a specific model to assess the vulnerability and resilience of a territorial area. Such a model is therefore intended to be a tool proposed for a wide use in teaching what vulnerability and resilience are, how important is their assessment and how to produce a useful assessment. The second one is more general and regards the improvement of knowledge and communication for what concerns the complex matters of vulnerability and resilience to natural and na-tech hazards and their assessment.
The e-learning tool has been organized as a course without external assistance, available in a website free on internet (available for free at http://ensure.metid.polimi.it/, requires an easy registration), and has been designed to reach and involve a variety of students, practitioners and other technicians as target users.
The e-learning path offers a sequence of themes, theories, methodologies, tools, and case studies the users can browse and experience. All learning materials come from the ENSURE project activities, which made it necessary to revise and “rework” the documents produced by the ENSURE partners during the research activities to adapt contents to the e-learning uses.
The essay offers a description of the activities and choices made by the working group to obtain the learning path and materials and to design the architecture of the website. This having in mind the need to develop a learning and communication strategy able to introduce users – students and practitioners – to the importance of vulnerability and resilience matters and to capture them with interesting and appealing contents.
The following points will be discussed: main goals, main problems, the concept of the e-learning tool, specially developed to be used in the field of natural hazards, and the design of the website architecture.