ABOUT THE SERIES

Rapid industrialization of developing countries has led to an increasing demand for continuing professional development for environmental engineering personnel at all sectors, including industrial and infrastructure management sectors. Recognizing the need for continuing professional development, the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) provided five high quality environmental engineering texts earlier developed through a UNESCO-COL partnership to the Indian lnstitute of Science (llSc). They jointly examined the relevance of, and the degree of modification required for, offering at a distance those texts for practising professionals in environmental engineering. This resulted in a COL-funded project with llSc., taking the responsibility of coordinating and contributing to the design and development of a series of learning materials in Engineering Sciences. Based on the analysis of target audience, learning goals and objectives, and the desired course content with particular relevance to India, an outline of the content was created, which was reviewed by a committee of content and instructional design experts. The development of five self-learning environmental engineering Courses included formative evaluation by the project review committee and electronic list discussions. The summative evaluation included validation and pilot testing and brainstorm sessions to ascertain the suitability of materials to meet the project goals and objectives. The materials thus produced were revised on the basis of the feedback and are on offer at a distance currently within India. Nonetheless, these Courses when suitably adopted with contextual examples can meet the continuous professional development requirements of the developing countries in the Commonwealth. It is also believed that these Courses can be appropriately modularized to contribute to the proposal put forward by the World Federation of Engineering Organizations for the World Engineering Partnership for Sustainable Development.