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Overview
Goal
To Provide Client-Focused Conflict Education and Training Resource (CETR) Systems
For more information and cost estimates contact:
Guy Burgess or Heidi Burgess
Phone: (303)492-1635
E mail form.
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CETR systems provide affordable, anytime/anywhere access to instructional resources outlining options for more constructively handling conflicts and better promoting collaborative opportunities. Programs can be structured to provide support to those struggling with interpersonal disputes, workplace conflicts, business negotiations, organizational tensions, community debates, and public policy confrontations.
CETR System Features
"Real-World" Challenge Focus
CETR system content is selected for its applicability to the real-world conflict challenges faced by individuals and organizations involved in conflict from both adversarial and intermediary perspectives. Systems can be structured as background training programs, initial assessment and planning guides, or tools for assessing ongoing efforts and planning mid-course corrections. Challenges addressed might, for example, include:
- Anticipating and avoiding conflict,
- Limiting misunderstandings,
- Managing expectations,
- Building (and earning) trust,
- Cooperating across cultural boundaries,
- Dealing with difficult people, and
- Identifying and controlling rumors.
Access to Full Interdisciplinary Expertise
CETR systems provide access to conflict-related insights from scholars and practitioners who approach conflict problems from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines. The community providing this expertise includes experts specializing in all aspects of conflict resolution -- starting with the over 300 contributors to Conflict Information Consortium projects. Support for a Full Range of Training and Education
Settings
These include face-to-face programs; non-residential, online distributed-learning systems; anytime/anywhere, supplementary training; train-the-trainer/educator materials; and CETR Knowledge Base searching and browsing for individuals seeking quick access to training on specific topics.
The CETR Development Process
CETR systems are jointly developed by CRInfo conflict experts and client/partners with experience in the conflicts being addressed.
- Step #1: Joint Identification of Conflict Challenges that client/partners want to be able to address more constructively.
- Step #2: Joint Identification of Options for Meeting Each Challenge with information about the relative advantages and disadvantages of each option.
- Step #3: Preparation of Easy-to-Understand Lessons outlining each challenge and response option.
- Step #4: Provision of Anytime / Anywhere Lesson Access for use in structured instructional settings as well as in-the-field, supplementary training and self-study.
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Ability to Work Within Time Limits
Recognizing that training and education time is always in short supply, CETR systems are offered at a variety of levels ranging from quick 15-minute "reminders" through 8-hour training programs to longer courses. The goal is to provide people with the most useful information possible in the amount of time available (while also providing anytime/anywhere links to additional information). Ability to Work Within Financial Constraints
Just as CETR systems are designed to work within a variety of time-availability windows, they can also be designed to work within funding constraints. By using a variety of economizing strategies, we can create very useful systems with limited levels of support, though the same strategies enable us to create even stronger systems with additional funding. High-Interest Learning Objects (HILOs)
Many CETR resources employ HILO designs to quickly convey critical concepts in ways that support different learning styles, while also stimulating interest among participants whose attentiveness may be limited because of "information overload" and other factors. Principal HILO techniques include:
- Experiential Learning -- Games, simulations, and exercises require participants to actively work to meet learning system challenges.
- Multimedia Conflict Insights -- Conflict dynamics and intervention options are presented in a multimedia format designed to make lessons as interesting and easy to understand as possible.
- Interactive Components -- Active participant involvement is used wherever possible with passive "lecture/reading" minimized.
In-depth Resources
For instructors and advanced students, the HILOs are complemented with "drill down" links to thousands of pages of online material with increasingly in-depth and extensively cross-linked information on hundreds of topics. A continuous Web-crawling system and a meta-search engine provide access to the latest information from the large and diverse community of those working to improve society's conflict handling capabilities.
Examples of Conflict Situations That CETR Systems Can Help Address
- Promoting the positive, constructive aspects of inevitable and appropriate conflicts.
- Anticipating and minimizing conflicts that are likely to arise as a result of a new business initiative.
- Coordinating hastily-formed project teams composed of people representing organizations with dissimilar cultures.
- Dealing with people who may continue to fight even when it's not in their best interest to do so.
- Building collaborative teams and limiting "workplace conflicts" that can reduce their effectiveness.
- Designing systems to handle a continuing stream of disputes.
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Modular, Computer-based Architecture with Support for Classroom-based and Online Learning Settings
Instructors are able to easily select and assemble the CETR learning materials needed for their specific programs from an online catalog of printable and Web-based, materials.
Continuous Evaluation and Updating with "Reach Back" and "Reach Forward"
CETR materials can be continually evaluated, revised, and updated in light of emerging challenges by "reaching back" to the team of expert contributors assembled a produce each system and "reaching forward" to gather the insights of those with "on-the-ground" experience in applying CETR system concepts to real-world conflict problems.
About the
Conflict Information Consortium and CRInfo
The University of Colorado Conflict Information Consortium, directed by Guy and Heidi Burgess, was founded in 1988 as a multi-disciplinary center for research and teaching about conflict and its transformation. With its primary focus on difficult and intractable conflicts, the Consortium has pioneered efforts to use information technologies to provide citizens in all walks of life with the information that they need to deal with conflicts more constructively. The Consortium sees such efforts to enhance and mobilize the skills of the general population as critical to efforts to deal with complex, society-wide conflicts.
This work, which dates back to the earliest days of the Internet, has now led to the posting of new versions of CRInfo: The Conflict Resolution Information Source (www.CRInfo.org) and, for more difficult conflicts, Beyond Intractability, the website of the Intractable Conflict Knowledge Base Project (www.BeyondIntractability.org). These systems, which were constructed with the help of more than 250 experts, offer succinct, executive summary-type articles on almost 400 topics as well as links to recommended sources (Web, print, and audiovisual) of more in-depth information. Also available are over a hundred hours of online interviews, featuring more than 70 distinguished scholars and practitioners, and comprehensive bibliographies with more than 20,000 citations.
The Consortium currently offers, to the general public, five online courses as well as a variety of shorter training programs, exercises and other instructional materials. These materials provide a foundation for the much more sophisticated CETR systems described above.
More information and a detailed proposal describing how we might build a CETR system for you are available from the Consortium's Co-Directors, Guy Burgess and Heidi Burgess, 303-492-1635, burgess@colorado.edu.
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