Coaches Across Continents: Education across continents

Coaches Across Continent’s ‘On-Line Self-Directed Learning Coaching Course’ connects coaches from all over the world.

In March this year we started the worldwide first On-Line Coaching Course in Football for Social Impact. We are conducting a nine month long course whereby we guide the participants through the three Self-Directed-Learning (SDL) stages educate, adapt and create. Each of the stages lasts for three months.

In the educate stage the participants implement CAC games in their community. In the adapt stage they use existing football for social impact (FSI) games to develop games that are relevant to their local community by changing the rules and/or the social impact message of the game. And in the create stage they gain the skills to identify a social issue in their community and develop a completely new game to address it on the football field.

15 coaches participate in the course, they implement different FSI games each month and join our monthly Skype follow-up calls. During these calls they give us feedback about the games they implemented in their community and we discuss challenges and share successes.

The coaches are currently in the last month of the adapt stage. In the past two months each coach developed five game adaptations and this month they will now coach each other games, and give feedback to one another during our next Skype call. We are already excited to hear them talking to each other at the end of August. It will be their next step towards Self-Directed Learning and to solve their own problems.

The on-line platform “Sport Session Planner” makes all of that possible. The players learned in the first three months of the course how to use this tool by entering CAC games into their personal accounts. The “Sport Session Planner” allows participants to share games with other members and also gives them the option to copy existing games in order to change and make them their own. In their adaptations the coaches addressed various social issues such as alcohol and drug abuse, HIV/AIDS and family planning, the importance of education, gender equity, fun games and many more.