A Practical Course in Democracy for Iran

Washington - If the democratic future of Iran was born in June 2009 on the streets of Tehran, it can get its education in Tavaana's online classrooms.

Tavaana ( http://www.tavaana.org/index.jsp ) is a website, a series of online university-level courses and a wealth of resources - in Persian and English - to help Iranians learn about how others have made their societies and governments more democratic and responsive to the needs of their people. The first two courses will be offered beginning in summer 2010. Director Mariam Memarsadeghi said that in the two weeks after the site was unveiled, far more people signed up for those classes than can be accommodated.

"We have gotten a lot of applications for courses, many more than we expected, and significant numbers inside Iran," Memarsadeghi said in an interview at the Center for Liberty in the Middle East, a nonprofit group in Washington for which she works.

The center has done some pro-democracy education work before, Memarsadeghi said, with classes that combined online participation with teachers in physical classrooms in Amman, Jordan, and Cairo. "It was a hybrid approach between distance learning and in-person training," she said. The center also has done classes for Iranian activists, but security has been an issue.

"There have been a lot of workshops in countries around Iran, in Europe, in Iran, and many have been subject to a lot of surveillance and security problems for individuals after they've come back to Iran, or after they've been finished within Iran," she said.

It was clear that opening a classroom for pro-democracy courses in Tehran would put the teachers and the students in danger. "We wanted to avoid that by using all the anonymizing benefits of the Internet and all the cost-effective benefits of the Internet," she said.

It's no wonder that one of the first two courses being offered is on cybersecurity. The other, developed by George Washington University, also in Washington, is on developing leadership. Two other courses are scheduled to debut in the fall: "Create Your Activism Plan" and "Democracy Web," a course developed by the nonprofit groups Freedom House and the Albert Shanker Institute and translated into Persian by Tavaana. "The larger vision is definitely to have the same courses offered more than once, to have more courses and to have more people in each one of those courses," Memarsadeghi said.

Each class will be small at first - 15 to 20 students logged in - but people who cannot get into them will be able to learn the same material at their own pace on the Tavaana site. The site also offers a library of materials in English and Persian, resources for secure use of the Internet, video interviews with civic leaders and case studies of activists' efforts in countries around the world.

The courses are free; Tavaana is funded for now by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, and Memarsadeghi said the plan is to find other donors to keep it going.

Memarsadeghi said the Iranian government and its supporters have denounced Tavaana - "the usual, sort of, blacklisting and saying that we're a part of 'the American plot to overthrow the regime.' " She said she has no doubt that some of the virtual seats in the classes will be taken by people who are spying for the Iranian authorities.

"My personal experience with the real-world workshops, physical workshops, is that that's always the case. You have plants," she said. "But to be honest with you, it's not a concern, only because there's nothing we're teaching, and there's nothing about our methodology for teaching, that would make having a government employee or plant be a problem. For one thing, we'd be getting our content about democracy and human rights and government transparency and accountability - all of that stuff - to more people, and if people who are sympathetic to the government, or perhaps not sympathetic but working for the government in any case, start to partake in these kinds of opportunities, it might make a difference."

No student will be able to identify any of the others, and if anyone is disruptive in class discussions, "we reserve the right to, basically, kick people out," Memarsadeghi said.

Tavaana will not create democracy for the Iranian people, but it can be a useful tool, she said: "It's not because I think that the level of civic capacity is low. It's not because I think Iranians are not very courageous, that they're not highly educated, that they're not already aware what it is that they want. It's more that I think that the devil is in the details" - for instance, how a constitution can balance powers between different parts of the government, or skills that a leader can develop to be more effective.

"This material is not for the novice, necessarily," Memarsadeghi said. "It can also be very much for the person who's been involved in Iranian politics for decades now but can't manage to expand beyond their sort of natural constituency, and how to build coalitions that are really respectful of difference but highly effective and unified. Things like that, Iran really needs those things."

And "it would be amazing," she said, to have online forums for Iranians to talk about revising their constitution or deciding on the best ways to monitor their government.

Ultimately, Tavaana can offer a way for Iranians to learn about a wide range of issues, Memarsadeghi said. The website can be a platform for grass-roots environmental groups in the United States and Iran to work together, or for businesses to spread awareness in Iran of the need for breast cancer detection and early treatment.

For now, though, the focus is on helping Iranians expand their civil rights. "I feel like, as a person who came to this country - I came when I was 7 years old - it's sort of my civic duty to both countries, to the United States and the country where I was born, to bridge the divide between what we here in the United States have in terms of rights and freedoms and liberties and what people in Iran have," Memarsadeghi said. "And I see technology as a good vehicle to do that."