November 2017 marked the completion of the on-line course “Local Development Projects Management-7” (PM-7) which is the annual, most known and awaited learning event within the Community of Practice (CoP) for Local Development at http://udl.despro.org.ua/.Just like all previous courses, none of which followed the trodden path, this course was not an exception. And this means that the launch of such a broad-scale and ambitious on-line learning event, which involves between 500 and 800 participants each year, was preceded by the meticulously planned work of the team of tutors, experts, facilitators and administrators, as well as a pilot testing of the entire course before the enrolment of the participants.

Participants typically spend 10-12 hours weekly on-line receiving timely and productive feedback from tutors, having extensive opportunities for horizontal communications, access to consultations from experts and high-quality learning materials.

The ‘highlight’ and the main component of the course was the PRACTICAL exercise (Workshop) on Preparing a Local Development Project Concept, which consisted of two phases: (1) developing the concept of a local development project by each participant and presenting it to other course participants, and (2) peer assessment of the concepts: working as an expert on evaluating project concepts prepared by other participants, and providing feedback to their authors.

The main result of this learning activity at the Local Development CoP is that 216 participants (54% of which represent amalgamated communities) successfully completed the on-line course “Local Development Projects Management-7”and prepared their local development projects reviewed by peers and tutors/experts.

The detailed analysis on the e-course PM-7 is available here in pdf-format.