The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) is the umbrella organisation for Member Organisations from 145 countries around the world, with a total membership of 10 million. While Member Organisations offer training and development within their own countries, WAGGGS offers international opportunities. For example, WAGGGS offers opportunities for leadership development at international locations where a group of facilitators (typically five) facilitate the learning of a group of 30 participants during a week-long event; when possible, interpreters are provided. These events are widely lauded but are only available to a few; many potential participants cannot afford to travel or get the necessary permissions. In addition, the volunteer facilitators have limited time for travel and attending events.

This project seeks to explore how technology can be used to offer similar opportunities to those provided by the  face-to-face courses to a much wider audience while retaining the community and interactive  learning aspects of the existing programmes.  The study aims to contribute to understanding how individuals within a global voluntary organisation  react and interact with online informal learning.

Technology changes the way in which communities come together (Wenger, White & Smith, 2009); however, not everyone is at ease with technology and degrees of digital literacy vary  (Hargittai, 2005). Technology was expected to create a revolution in education by providing access across the globe (Friedman, 2005; Liyanagunawardena, Adams, Rassool & Williams, 2011). The reality is that introducing technology into education is always challenging (Collins & Halverson, 2010). There are concerns that this may further marginalise the deprived  (Carr-Chellman, 2005); many factors impact on participant’s ability to persevere with an online  course (Lee, Choi & Kim, 2012). With the international prevalence of social network sites, such  as Facebook and Twitter, people are becoming comfortable contributing in online places;  however, in pedagogic situation, there continues to be a “lurker” role (Arnold & Paulus, 2010;  Dennen, 2008).   

In this paper, the authors report their experiences of the trial run of an international online leadership and discuss the issues as they prepare for the next run.  

 Initial research (Williams, Spiret, Dimitriadi & McCrindle, 2012) had indicated that there is a high use and appreciation of technology within the organisation, across ages, cultures and languages. However, there is not equal access to technologies, technological capabilities of members vary around the world and within neighbourhoods, and for some obtaining connectivity to the  Internet is challenging. 

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