With 450 members and institutions SANTREN (Southern African Network for Training on the Environment) is the largest R&D network for environmental management in the Southern African Development Community - SADC. SANTREN has been developing an infrastructure for an efficient administration of data on the environment and for the delivery of training to industry. Two development agencies from Europe, the German “Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft” and the Danish DANIDA are the major financial supporters of SANTREN. In 2001 a platform for Internet publishing (ZMS) and distributed collaboration was introduced. The aim: to facilitate the regional cooperation of the distributed institutions and to enable SANTREN to become a provider for authentic local content on the global marketplace for knowledge.
ZMS allows a decentralised template based production and the editing of content on the Internet via a browser. Subject matter experts, such as the Geologists of SANTREN, are enabled to administer complex websites by themselves. They can concentrate on their abilities: producing expert content.
Through this process rationalisation SANTREN was able to speed up considerably the publishing process. Because the involvement of media agencies could be reduced significantly through the empowerment of the authors themselves publishing costs went down as well.
Empowerment and capacity building – two major objectives of development policy – have been successfully implemented with the support of an internet application service for distributed authoring.
Through two blended learning training programmes on Instructional Design provided by Hoffmann & Reif and its partner "common sense" today the SANTREN member institutions are able to produce online courses themselves.
The blended learning training on Instructional Design fulfils a strategic role for SANTREN. Through this training members and institutions of SANTREN are enabled to produce their own Internet based training programmes on an on-going basis.
In summer 2001 an e-learning course “Environmental Management” was produced locally along the lines of the instructional design specifications and published in a distributed fashion on the Internet.
This was an important milestone for SANTREN on the way to becoming a competitive knowledge provider on the Internet.
With the course on Environmental Management today SANTREN is entering the global market place for knowledge. With this Internet based course SANTREN offers unique and authentic knowledge on how to manage environmental issues in the specific environment of a developing country. Such content has a great potential on the highly competitive global knowledge market place which is still very much dominated by institutions from the North.
Hoffmann & Reif has been supporting SANTREN since 1999.