Climate Literacy MOOC launches

By Heather McCabe posted on May 17th, 2013

Navigating Climate Change Conversations - Sara Harris & Sara Bur

UBC’s third massive open online course, or MOOC, Climate Literacy: Navigating Climate Change Conversations launched May 20. More than 17,000 students from around the world have enrolled in the course.

The free, online course leads students through the science behind how the earth’s climate system works and how humans affect the climate system. The course looks at impacts of climate change and ways that people are addressing climate change, such as the development of renewable energy technologies and transitions toward low carbon, resilient communities.

The instructors for the course, Sarah Burch, a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, and Sara Harris, a senior instructor in Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, draw upon their expertise in climate change governance and climate science, respectively.

As part of the course, students will have the opportunity to document something about the climate or climate change in their communities, as well as an aspect of mitigation in their communities. These videos or documents that students create will be posted on a map so that they can see and discuss what is happening in different places around the world.

Climate Literacy is part of a pilot project at UBC that is offering four MOOCs. The final course, Introduction to Systematic Program Design, will begin on June 3.