Advent calendar #13: Longing for a MOOC Fairy!

Sarah Speight writes: Over the last few days, Helen Whitehead, Steven Stapleton and myself have been madly building Nottingham’s first MOOC for the FutureLearn platform: ‘Sustainability, Society and You’. We’ve run a Moodle version of the course twice now so you might think it should be easy just to transfer it from Moodle to FutureLearn. …

Advent calendar #4: On becoming a MOOC video star!

In preparation for the MOOC Sustainability, Society and You, a series of short films were shot in the University’s Cripps Hall House as mentioned by Sarah in her previous post ‘The award for ‘one-take wonder’ goes to…’ My role was to interview a number of the guests and tour the house picking up on what …

Advent calendar #3: Biodiversity offsetting and the value of nature

Neil Sinclair, a philosophy lecturer involved in the Sustainability, Society and You MOOC on FutureLearn. has recently posted on the Think About It blog about the ethics of biodiversity. His post Biodiversity Offsetting and Extrinsic Properties talks about the involvement of Nottinghamshire in the pilot phase of the biodiversity offsetting scheme about which the UK Government …

Mike the Engineer

In which Mike Clifford introduces Sarah Speight to the concept of upcycling and she gains a chair. One of the academics who has made a major contribution to the Sustainability course is Mike Clifford, an Associate Professor of Mechanical, Materials and Manufacturing Engineering. Mike never says no. He was co-author of the book Sustainability and Engineering, …

My Sustainability Guru

I became a convert to Sustainability because I sat next to a particular person in a meeting. This was back in 2011. Keith Pitcher, Nottingham’s first Director of Sustainability, recently arrived from the University of Leeds, presented a paper to a committee of academics on the importance of thinking about sustainability in relationship to teaching. …