Accreditation: Permaculture Certificate, College Credit, Internship Credit, and Ecovillage Accreditation

We can also help participants who are currently enrolled in a college or university arrange to receive course credit and/or fulfill internship requirements at the institution they are enrolled in.

The sections below provide more detail about the certificates, college course credit, and internship credit:

Permaculture Design Certificate

Course participants will receive a permaculture design course (PDC) certificate upon successful completion of the course. Successful completion is determined by adequate attendance and participation in the course, and completion of make-up assignments for portions of the permaculture design course curriculum that are missed.

The permaculture certificate indicates that the holder of it has gone through the 72 hours of curriculum. Having a permaculture design course certificate allows you to use the word "permaculture" in a professional context, for purposes of advertising your services, consulting, or using the word in a name of business. It is required for teaching permaculture.

The longer programs cover considerably more information related to permaculture than a standard permaculture design course. Therefore, we also indicate on the certificate for the longer courses that they are a 2-month or 1-month (rather than 2-week) permaculture course with an emphasis on communities, which distinguishes this certificate from 2-week design course certificates as being more in-depth.

College Credit

Course participants can earn college course credit and/or fulfill internship requirements for completing this program. Students have received credit for our permaculture programs from institutions such as University of Oregon, University of Pennsylvania Slippery Rock, Oberlin, the Audubon Institute, and Gaia University. For information about enrolling at Gaia University and receiving college credit for Lost Valley's Ecovillage & Permaculture Certificate Program, visit www.gaiauniversity.org.

Lost Valley Educational Center is not a formally accredited educational institution. We have not seen the need to pay the high fees involved and instead choose to put all our available resources toward the creation of high quality programming that can be found nowhere else. However, we do have the support of a number of academic institutions and are happy to help students receive credits at the school they are currently enrolled in. Most college and university departments offer a number of courses that allow students to pursue their own interests outside what the department offers. There are a variety of names for such courses, including "independent study", "research", "thesis and final project", "special projects", "off-campus program offered through independent institution" (the exact names may vary among different institutions). If you are interested in receiving credit for this program, please ask a faculty member or adviser in the institution you are enrolled in what options there are for students to receive credit for pursuing independent studies or off-campus programs.

The faculty or department may ask for information about the program. Upon request, Lost Valley can provide:

• A schedule of the program, which includes the number of hours of course work
• Description of the credentials of the instructors
• An evaluation of the student's participation and progress by a primary instructor with an advanced degree
• Instructors are available to speak with faculty members and describe the subjects covered in more detail
• Assistance in understanding how the content of this program will relate to the students overall academic journey and goals

Cost of accreditation: The cost of the Lost Valley program does not increase for students who receive credit. However, your home institution will most likely require a fee as well for offering you credit for our program. For example, your department may require you to enroll in their summer session for the number of credits you will receive for the Lost Valley program and you will need to pay Lost Valley for the program and your home institution separately for the credits. Some colleges and universities offer such credits for less than the price of regular course credits because there are not teacher fees. This factor and the low relatively price of Lost Valley's program can make taking the program for credit roughly equivalent in cost to a standard college course.

One option to make it more affordable to receive credit for our program is if you can arrange with your department to receive the credits during a semester in which you are already enrolled, described below in "term of enrollment".

Term of Enrollment: The most common arrangement is that a department will require that you enroll in their summer session for the number of credits you will receive during the summer you are at Lost Valley.

Some students have arranged to use the content from the EPCP program as a base for further work in future terms and receive credit then. In many departments, adding additional credits can be much less expensive than enrolling in a summer semester. For example, a student returning to school for the fall semester could take 8 regular course credits in their department plus additional independent study credits for the Lost Valley program. However, most departments would require that for you to receive credits in this fashion, you would need to do some of the work for those credits during the semester in which you are receiving the credits. This would be the case if the Lost Valley program was used for background and beginning research for a project that is then elaborated on in another semester. For example, a design student could take the concepts from the design project completed at Lost Valley and then rework those in much greater detail, in another semester for an independent study then. This would also be a good way to review the material from Lost Valley and further integrate it. This same process could happen with using the Lost Valley program to generate ideas for a thesis or final project that is then developed further for thesis/project credit in other semesters.

University of Oregon credit: Occasionally, a department at a student's home institution will not help a student receive credit for our program because it only accepts coursework from accredited institutions. In this case, Lost Valley instructors may be able to help set up an independent study for you through the University of Oregon, as we have done with students in past years in this situation. However, this will incur some additional costs, as you will need to pay the regular Lost Valley program cost, an additional fee for University of Oregon summer session, and any fees your home institution may require for receiving credit for this.

If you are a University of Oregon student, you can go about receiving credit in the way described above for students at other universities by finding a faculty member or adviser and describing the program to them. Or you can contact us to see if we know faculty in your department who may already know about the program. Students from the UO have received independent study credit in the Environmental Studies Department, PPPM department (Planning, Public Policy and Management), and studio credits in Landscape Architecture. We have also had students in the Architecture department receive studio credit for working with Lost Valley-related design projects.

Internship Credit

Many academic departments encourage or require students to fulfill an internship requirement. For students receiving internship credits, we can provide:

• giving the student responsibilities including: helping with curriculum, teaching and facilitating a segment of the course, helping coordinate hands-on projects, engaging in additional research
• an assessment by one of our staff of the students performance and progress