Ending Slavery free online course starts 17 October

The world’s first ever online course about contemporary slavery is open for registration now. Ending Slavery is a four-week course starting on 17 October 2016. You’ll learn from experts at the cutting edge of human rights research, and you’ll investigate the complex systems that sustain slavery today. Professor Kevin Bales, one of the lead educators, …

The world of Sustainability, Society and You participants

It’s been great to see so many people joining in with our upcoming MOOC Sustainability, Society and You from all over the world and in so many occupations and walks of life. Although the course hasn’t started yet it is possible to join in the Welcome discussion once you’ve signed up for the course (the …

Keep calm and pre-cycle!

As part of the closing stages of the ‘Sustainability, Society and You’  MOOC we ask participants to, if they wish, produce a poster on a subject relating to sustainability. These are then peer reviewed by other learners. As many are posted publicly, we have seen some wonderful examples, from simple informative posters or exhortations to …

Learner reactions to the MOOC: Sustainability, Society and You

Sarah Speight has been reflecting on the first run of  Sustainability, Society and You (starting for its second time on 16 June). She writes: over 37,000 comments were posted by learners and tutors during the 8 weeks of Sustainability, Society and You. We had our contentious debates:  for example over the contribution of the arts …

Learning sustainably and about sustainability

In week 6 of the Sustainability, Society and You course (which runs again later in the year) we looked at sustainable learning and learning for sustainability.   There is evidence to suggest that online learning is sustainable in the sense of its environmental footprint (less travel, less printing out of learning materials, and fewer resources in …

How “likes” can help you learn

Like other social platforms, FutureLearn has a “Like” function.  This means whenever you read something you agree with or think is well put, meaningful or significant in any way, you can respond to it, but you can also “Like” it. For each list of Comments or Discussion you can then sort posts according to how …

Scooping Sustainability

In order to try to curate some of the blog posts, tweets, etc. coming out of our current FutureLearn MOOC, I’ve set up a Scoop.it page for Sustainability, Society & You and am attempting to add to it posts, pages and RSS feeds of relevance. Let me know if you have written about the course …

Sustainability, Society and You – learning across cultures and contexts

Sarah Speight writes: The University of Nottingham’s first MOOC got off to a flying start on January 6th with lots of interaction between learners around the world – New Zealand, America, Latvia, Australia, Pakistan, Bahrain, Egypt, all corners of the United Kingdom, Ireland, Iran, Venezuela, Colombia…. too many to mention. We have developed the course …

How to be successful as a student in a MOOC

I was looking at Dave Cormier’s five point plan for getting the most out of a MOOC as a student. It makes a lot of sense. Here’s what it might look like for a participant in Sustainability, Society and You, which started this week. 1. ORIENT Each MOOC takes place in a platform that you …

How to join the discussion in Sustainability, Society and You

Join the discussion!  There are no real right and wrong answers in the field of sustainability. In the ‘Sustainability, Society and You’ MOOC (starting tomorrow through FutureLearn), we invite you to look at the evidence and make your own decisions especially about the actions you can take to become more sustainable and influence our society to …