Ecosystem services
What can you find on this page?
What did we do?
Work methods
Ecosystem services were one of the themes in the Joensuu pilot course. It was the topic of one of the small groups.
The essential part of the methods were real-life case study visits and lectures from experts. However, before the course, students got some pre-materiels and they answered assignments about those pre-materials. At the beginning of the actual course, students got some basic information about low carbon society, and climate change. On the second day of the course, students got some lectures about communication, research methods and reporting from experts. After this lectures students had three days for those case study visits which were made individually for each group.
Based on this case study visits and lectures students made their seminar presentations. In these seminar presentations, they proposed an answer to the work-related topic based problem.
Resources
This kind of case study based study module has some resource demands which you should take into account if you are planning to compose similar kind of study unit. First, you should consider giving students some pre-materials and assignments before course. By this pre-assignments, you can ensure that students know the basics before this kind of intensive course. Secondly, you should arrange some time at the beginning of the course to give some information about climate change and low carbon society and to go through pre-assignments. You should also get some expert lecturers to speak about work methods.
The most important part of course arrangements is to get some non-academic work life contacts and arrange students some visits and lectures from them. You can also ask if they have some work-related problem which students can solve in their seminar work. Otherwise, the problem can be invented by professors.
Outcomes
As a study outcome, students answered the question “How to incentivize low carbon land use without over-burdening individual actors?”. Their outcomes were in a form of a scientific poster and a popular kind of video. You can find the poster underneath.
You can find the video underneath.
An example of a study module framework
| Day 1 | Introduction to the topic |
| Day 2 | Introduction to the work and reporting methods |
| Day 3 | Study visits and lectures |
| Day 4 | Study visits and lectures |
| Day 5 | Study visits and lectures |
| Day 6 | Working with reporting and presentations |
| Day 7 | Working with reporting and presentations |
| Day 8 | Seminar |