Opinion
A Massive Open Online Course on climate change: the social construction of a global problem using new tools for connectedness Sarah L. Burch1∗ and Sara E. Harris2 Climate change is a pervasive and challenging phenomenon that takes on a variety of meanings and frames, each of which suggests different victims, villains, and solutions. New tools are emerging that may facilitate a reframing, or at least the collaborative coproduction, of the climate change conversation. Web-based social media have provided a new level of connectedness and capacity to collaborate through a merging of the social and educational worlds in the form of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs): web-based, freely available courses taught by university and college instructors, and offered to thousands of students at a time. Our development and delivery of the first interdisciplinary climate change MOOC has opened a new window into (1) the tools available to convene a conversation about climate change, (2) the processes of negotiation, cultural articulation, and identity formation that occur through conversations that include large populations from diverse backgrounds, and (3) the implications of this conversation for the broader climate change discourse, the definition of the problem, attributions of responsibility, and the development of solutions. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. How to cite this article:
WIREs Clim Change 2014, 5:577–585. doi: 10.1002/wcc.300
INTRODUCTION
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ew tools are emerging that may facilitate a reframing, or at least the collaborative coproduction, of the climate change conversation, including the myriad values at play in conversations about a more holistic approach to sustainability. While mail, videos, and later the Internet have long been used to deliver traditional educational materials, web-based social media have provided a new level of connectedness and capacity to collaborate. This has now fed directly into the merging of the social and educational worlds in the form of Massive Open Online Courses ∗ Correspondence
to:
[email protected]
1 Department
of Geography and Environmental Management, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada 2 Earth, Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Conflict of interest: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.
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(MOOCs): web-based, freely available courses taught by university and college instructors, and offered to thousands of students at a time. MOOCs exploded onto the education scene starting in 2012, just 4 years after Stephen Downes and George Siemens made their online Connectivism course at the University of Manitoba freely available, attracting more than 2000 participants.1 Since then, major providers of MOOCs (such as Coursera, Udacity, edX, and FutureLearn) have partnered with hundreds of major universities to offer MOOCs to over 3 million students around the world. Media attention, reflecting both extreme enthusiasm and cutting criticism, has swelled since 2012, creating a rich and varied conversation about the future of education. Beginning in May of 2013, we codeveloped and offered the first MOOC that addressed the contentious, complex, and polarizing issue of climate change: ‘Climate Literacy: Navigating Climate Change Conversations’—a course offered under the
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banner of the University of British Columbia and through the Coursera MOOC platform. More than 24,000 students from 139 countries enrolled in this course. Most students originated from North America (41%), Europe (26%), and Asia (19%), while fewer students were from South America (6%), Oceania (4%), and Africa (3%). Around 12,000 students engaged in assignments, lectures, and discussion forums with around 2600 active through the full 10 weeks. This has opened a new window into (1) the tools available to convene a conversation about climate change, (2) the processes of negotiation, cultural articulation, and identity formation that occur through conversations that include large populations from a range of backgrounds (acknowledging that diversity does not necessarily lead to legitimacy or robust participation), and (3) the implications of this conversation for the broader climate change discourse, the definition of the problem, and attributions of responsibility. Various individuals, communities, and organizations around the world define desirable and feasible responses to climate change very differently. Sustainability, after all, is about values:2 what a community wants to preserve, strengthen, and build (keeping in mind that the values of people in the future matter as well). Creating and imposing a single definition of sustainability may in fact reduce the likelihood that communities can envision a locally relevant, meaningful future that is motivating, feasible, and desirable.3 Despite the fruitful and exciting variety of sustainability visions, most attempt to balance a number of elements: ecological integrity, economic development (if not growth, in the traditional sense), and social equity.4,5 In other words, communities around the world have multiple priorities. The urgency of responding to climate change is very real, but so are problems related to water quality, poverty, sanitation, literacy, community liveability, biodiversity, and social equity. Exploring these priorities is a crucial dimension of responding to climate change, and a necessary precursor to effective action. We suggest an unusual way to capture and describe both the climate change problem and solutions to it. Rather than defining climate change as a particular (measurable) set of outcomes or processes related to radiative forcing, carbon cycling, precipitation patterns, and ocean circulation shifts, we highlight the ways in which climate change is a cultural construct. Moreover, we explore the rapidly expanding realm of MOOCs, and the capacity for this intersection of pedagogy and technology to facilitate collaboration of a scale and diversity that had been 578
heretofore impossible. Given the diversity of interests and the complexity of interactions that are at play if climate change is considered within the context of sustainability, it may be useful to consider the potential power of web-based social media and mass education tools to facilitate conversations about desirable solutions to climate change. Ultimately, our goal is to explore climate change through the lens of connectivity, to consider the challenges and opportunities presented by collaborative learning and interaction on a significantly grander scale than is possible with face-to-face learning, and consider how students in this educational context understand climate change.
EXCITING, FLAWED, AND GAINING MOMENTUM: THE EMERGING WORLD OF MOOCs MOOCs have been hailed as a great equalizer, providing global access to education for the price of an Internet connection.6 This is in stark contrast to traditional educational approaches in which a small number of students, often with significant financial resources, can access postsecondary education. MOOCs also allow students from diverse backgrounds to interact with one another, and facilitate the delivery of highly specialized, timely, and provocative material. Praise is far from ubiquitous; MOOCs have simultaneously been denigrated as a demon that will impoverish educational opportunities,7 promote conformity, and potentially threaten democracy.8 So far, however, MOOCs are largely reaching people who are already educated,9 neither those at the margins nor those seeking university credit. Language barriers can hamper participant interaction, even if course materials are made available in multiple languages. Differential access to the Internet also creates widely varying capacities to participate meaningfully. The large numbers of participants mean that direct instructor engagement is limited, and that assessment relies on either computer-marked work or peer review. While peer review can be structured to work well with sufficient guidance, varying cultural expectations of academic work10 can cause mismatches between student work, expectations, and feedback given and received. MOOCs are often criticized for their low completion rates—typically less than 10% (Jordan, 2014)—although it is unsurprising that, when barriers to entry and consequences for leaving are low, many will explore and sample these courses with their own commitments, intentions, and goals in mind.12 And, in raw numbers, even the relatively small 2600
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active through Climate Literacy compares favorably to numbers that could be reached in physical classrooms. As a result of the large number of participants and thousands of discussion forum posts, the MOOC learning environment is often very lightly moderated by instructors and teaching assistants. This presents the opportunity for abusive rhetoric to emerge, whether among students, directed toward the instructors, or taking aim at other scholars, activists, and decision-makers. Cultivating a respectful learning environment without unnecessary or excessive censorship is a challenge, and one that shapes participants’ experiences of the course. In this course specifically, a decision was made in the second iteration to engage a group of approximately 6–10 ‘Community Teaching Assistants:’ volunteers who had contributed meaningfully in the first iteration who would then be present on discussion forums to answer questions and monitor behavior. The exact role of these individuals is evolving however; the deletion of abusive comments and the occasional warning drew the ire of a handful of students, while clearly making the discussions more fruitful and collegial for the majority of students. Exactly how to permit conflicting perspectives while diligently preventing ad hominem attacks or spam raises questions about the ethics of interaction via social media. While the strength of engagement through social media is that a more open and egalitarian discourse may be permitted,13,14 this interaction could also produce what climate scholars might consider ‘undesirable’ outcomes, such as consensus that action on climate change is not warranted given uncertainty, or apathy in the face of the scale of the challenge. Such outcomes could be altered given more active or goal-oriented moderation of the participant interaction, but the organic and spontaneous nature of this interaction may suffer as a result. Because of this risk, our goals (or desired outcomes) were to provide students with scientific fundamentals surrounding the causes of climate change, and a relatively balanced view of the possible solutions, while allowing students to present additional information and argue for contrasting views. A successful course was considered one in which students engaged with this material, and with each other, collaboratively discussing the need for action in response to climate change and what form this action might take. Based on our experience, we think the student discussions were richer with minimal instructor interference (authorities can shut down discussion), and we saw little evidence of undesirable outcomes such as those listed above. Volume 5, September/October 2014
Fundamental challenges in instructional design are the same for MOOCs as for any other learning experience. To incorporate new ideas into our existing mental models takes deliberate practice,15 and any effective educational experience must provide meaningful opportunities for participants to engage. In our case, they may be grappling with new content, such as the carbon cycle, or may be practicing online discussion skills and persuasive argumentation. The bottom line is that opportunities provided must facilitate active participation in one’s own learning, which may be even more important in a MOOC with less direct instructor feedback available.
STUDENT ENGAGEMENT AND THE COLLABORATIVE DEFINITION OF CLIMATE CHANGE Opportunities abound to participate in online conversations about climate change, so why have a course at all? The educational setting provides a more focused and coherent space than the Internet at large, although the resources and ideas generated by participants can range widely.16 Gathering in a course setting opens up significant opportunities to harness the knowledge and skills of participants, particularly as the science and policy of climate change are rapidly evolving and context-specific. For Climate Literacy, while we provided content about both the scientific and human dimensions of climate change, we also asked participants to seek and evaluate information, and share their knowledge. Participants thus have opportunities to be contributors of content to the course themselves. Participants drove the extremely active discussion forums, contributing countless resources for exploration. They also generated various mechanisms for added social engagement (such as city- or country-based face-to-face study teams, Facebook groups, and a plethora of others). Through these activities, the course offers a venue for the collaborative definition of a problem, with all its social and biophysical complexity. The course is framed as an exploration into a complex question, which, in many cases, has no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer that can be taught by an expert. As part of the course, thousands of participants were asked to venture into their own communities and explore both climate changes and also promising mitigation and adaptation strategies that have been either implemented or proposed. The effectiveness, desirability, and feasibility of these strategies were to be briefly presented in either written or video format, uploaded to a communally accessible map, and shared with their colleagues in the course. Figure 1 illustrates
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FIGURE 1 | Geographic location of student assignments, focusing on the causes and consequences of, along with solutions to, climate change. Pin colors are chosen by users and are not meaningful.
the geographic diversity and number of posts that were added by students during the first iteration of the course. Examples of the solutions brought forward by students are as diverse as the regions from which they came: rewetting of peatland in the Moscow region, watershed protection plans in Hawaii, and crop adaptation in Argentina. The purpose in part is to broaden the definition of expertise in this field, and invite input beyond that offered by traditional ‘experts’ in climate change adaptation and mitigation. This type of assignment, in the context of a MOOC, is useful for three reasons: (1) Students translate a vague, global scale phenomenon into what it means in their own community, exploring solutions that are locally appropriate and potentially innovative,( 2) Students share these stories. MOOCs allow individuals from remote, developing communities and large industrialized cities alike to contribute stories that are relevant to them. (3) This sharing creates potential for collaborative learning, transferal of ideas and innovative solutions, as well as building local evidence for a global phenomenon. A second dimension of the course, the vibrant and contentious discussion forums, further highlights the capacity of MOOCs to stimulate conversations about desirable futures in the context of climate change. During the 10-week course term, over 30,000 posts were made to the discussion forum. Posts ranged from brief statements of introduction and connection, to extremely detailed essays on the causes and consequences of climate change, backed up by scientific evidence, external resources, and personal stories. Discussion forum ‘threads’ frequently erupted into heated debates, pitting groups of students against one another, and occasionally devolved into abusive 580
rhetoric or personal attacks. Meta-discussions about the nature of online interactions around climate change yielded insights into the discussion process and learning opportunities for those less practiced. For example, Figure 2 shows a conversation about the level of consensus around the causal link between climate change and human activity and illustrates one path that this conversation can follow. Of particular interest in the thread in Figure 2 are claims made about the causes of climate change, arguments about potential sources of bias in both the science itself and in the description of consensus, and the relative importance of that consensus with regard to the ultimate imperative for mitigation or adaptation. This thread contained over 300 posts, allowing participants to ask specific questions about the nature of consensus about climate change and the legitimacy of science as the dominant voice proclaiming the seriousness of the problem. Instructors played no role in this conversation, but rather observed as individuals with widely varying levels of expertise in this field reached a broad (though not flawless) consensus of their own. These, and other conversations in the course, illustrate powerfully that climate change is not simply a technical problem to be solved, but a sociocultural manifestation of, and challenge to, fundamental (and diverging) notions of progress, the robustness of nature, and trust in science. It also has the potential to stimulate creativity, new conversations about justice, and more equitable forms of governance.17 For instance, a filmed interview between Prof. John Robinson and one of the course instructors explored the idea of ‘regenerative sustainability:’ the notion that technologies and processes are available that can do more than simply reduce the negative impact of production and consumption on
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5 months ago
The Cook et al paper has been trashed by a number of analysts with no skin in the game. Cook also assisted in an earlier, laughably flawed online survey study headed by psychologist Stefan Lewandowsky of UWA. The study was equally trashed by lucid, independent analysis and, as I understand it, Lewandowsky has departed from Australia with mud on his face.
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· flag 5 months ago
The 97% stat seems pretty damning to anyone arguing that climate change is a myth. But many climate change “deniers” will argue that climate change IS occuring, but that it is not caused by humans. I’m wondering if there are any polls done that ask climate scientists this specific question. How much agreement is there on this issue? Edit: Apologies for posting this in the wrong section!
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· flag 5 months ago
Hello Please go through the paper by “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in thescientific literature by John Cook1,2,3, Dana Nuccitelli2,4, Sarah A Green5, Mark Richardson6,B”arbel Winkler2, Rob Painting2, Robert Way7, Peter Jacobs8 and Andrew Skuce2,” . It speaks about scientific consensus on AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) . This paper is quite exhaustive and would give you an idea. best wishes,
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· flag 4 months ago
If my understanding is correct, 97.1% of ALL climate research papers that take a position on the cause of climate change point to anthropogenic causes. Only a wee fraction of those that take a position on the cause of climate change believe it is NOT anthropogenic. As expected many climate papers discuss the results of some study and don’t say one way or the other because that is not the subject of the paper. Only 32.6% of all the research papers reviewed take a position. I’ve read a lot of ice core and other paleoclimatology papers and I don’t remember that they took a position. However, after interviewing the scientists that produced these papers, I can assure you they firmly believe that climate change is due to human emissions.
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Certainly it is important to have a consensus on the anthropogenic causes to direct policy changes and government support of programs and initiatives. Individuals and their communitites must take responsibility in their role too. This awareness and message is crucial to better understand our circumstances and make some changes. Deniers and skeptics will always be there; it doesn’t change the course of events that will unfold. Understanding the consequences and preparing for what is to come will be very important. Seven billion people have a huge impact on this planet!
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FIGURE 2 | Series of discussion forum posts in the Climate Literacy Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), exploring the assertion that 97% of scientists agree that humans have caused climate change.
the environment, but rather transform development pathways and deliver on multiple priorities simultaneously. This interview stimulated significant conversation among students about their own visions Volume 5, September/October 2014
of the future, and fostered exactly the sort of visioning (if unstructured) that is a crucial component of participatory scenario development and the coproduction of policy-relevant knowledge.18 Students contributed
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their perspectives on attributions of responsibility for acting on climate change, a localized versus globalized vision of sustainable futures, and the need for a reframing of the climate change debate to avoid a sense of disempowerment or failure.
MOOCs AS ENGINES OF SOCIAL INNOVATION AND CONVENERS OF NON-STATE ACTORS Beyond creating a forum for the exchange of creative, local solutions to climate change, the course also introduces the possibility of cooperation and action beyond the course. MOOCs may in fact have the potential to create a new network of individuals, perhaps even a ‘non-nation-state actor’ (NNSA) in the language of climate change governance, which could influence decision-making, build awareness, and come up with creative solutions. The role of NNSAs in the governance of climate change at all scales is being given increasing attention in the scholarly community.19,20 Since the initial negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol, climate change has been viewed as a global issue that is most appropriately governed at the global level. Stalled negotiations and lackluster results in terms of emissions reductions, however, have triggered increasing policy development, and scholarly analysis, at the local level. Communities are the scale at which any mitigation or adaptation policy is ultimately implemented, and offer a closer link between individuals and decision-makers.21,22 Jurisdictional overlap, variations in capacity, and the need for policy coherence at multiple scales, however, suggests the value of a multilevel governance approach to climate change adaptation and mitigation.23 Furthermore, it highlights the potential influence of fluid, issue-oriented alliances between levels of government and various actors (a polycentric model) in contrast to a more hierarchical model in which competencies are distributed rather than overlapping.24,25 Multilevel governance theory suggests that NNSAs play a crucial role in the governance of climate change responses: the legitimacy, influence, and ingenuity required to design and implement climate change responses has diffused away from the nation state, and now rests in part in the hands of the private sector, civil society, transnational networks, and even individuals. Furthermore, these actors are particularly important sources of innovation on climate change. The sustainability transitions literature, for instance, argues that sources of change in sociotechnical systems are most likely to occur at the ‘niche’ level.26 Niches are protected spaces in which a radical novelty 582
can develop, unhindered by the market forces and sociocultural rules that typically provide relative stability in the broader sociotechnical system.27 Rules in these niches are less certain, providing an opportunity for intentional deviation from the underlying path.28 NNSAs may be important actors in these niche spaces, producing creative responses to the climate change problem, capitalizing on opportunities to innovate, and spreading effective solutions. MOOCs hold the potential to convene a large, geographically diverse group of individuals while providing substantive instruction regarding the causes and consequences of climate change. Furthermore, networks of individuals with the potential for creative collaboration can emerge within the context of MOOCs.29 Networks that are anchored in local spaces and focused on sharing innovative and locally relevant solutions to climate change may trigger effective sustainability transitions.
EARLY INDICATIONS OF THE POTENTIAL FOR ACTION What evidence exists that participation in a MOOC about climate change could spur interactions beyond the confines of the course? Based on end-of-course surveys, 44% of participants in Climate Literacy said they will or might keep communicating with others from the course. More than 66% expressed that after the course they were ‘more willing to participate in societal decisions related to climate’, compared to 6% who felt that ‘changing our behaviour or policies isn’t worth doing’. The two most popular reasons for contributing to the discussion forums were: (1) ‘I wanted to respond to others who were posting about questions of interest to me’ and (2) ‘I wanted to learn about or take action on climate change beyond what we were provided in this course’. In addition, participants’ self-assessed (and measured) knowledge about climate change showed a positive shift from the start to the end of the course, as did their confidence in communicating about climate change to nonexperts (Figure 3). Their perceptions of the threat of climate change shifted slightly higher, particularly when asked about the threat to others. If we consider Gifford’s30 ‘dragons of inaction’ that keep people from engaging in climate change mitigation and adaptation, these small pieces of evidence from Climate Literacy imply that participation in a MOOC may help people overcome at least some of the dragons. Knowledge can be one limitation, and although knowledge alone is clearly not enough to trigger action,31 it is required in order to implement effective solutions. As described above,
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(a)
(b) 70 60
How much do you know about global warming or climate change?
40 30 20 10
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% Respondents
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60
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How confident do you feel in communicating about climate change to nonexperts?
40 30 20 10 0
0 Virtually nothing
A little
Something
A lot
A great deal
Not at all
Not very
Neutral
Somewhat
Very
FIGURE 3 | Shifts in participant knowledge (a) and confidence (b) between the start (Pre) and end (Post) of the course.
many MOOC participants indicated that they finished the course having gained knowledge about climate change and potential solutions. Worldviews and social norms, however, are likely stronger determinants of action potential. Given that the MOOC participants displayed both increased knowledge and slightly increased perceptions of the risks of climate change, this population may be dominated by ‘egalitarian communitarians’,32 who perceive that climate change presents a high risk to human society, a sense that increases with increasing knowledge. Like knowledge, risk perception alone does not spur action, and can even be paralyzing, but by forming new networks within the course community, people may be able to overcome or dilute old social norms that might keep them from action, and build new ones. And while intent to act also does not necessarily translate to action, intent not to act is highly likely to result in no action. More nuanced questions in the pre/post participant survey, paired with longitudinal research as the course continues, will help to provide a clearer picture of the potential for this MOOC to influence action. Discussion forum participation and the pre/post survey permit us to offer two speculative hypotheses regarding the relevance of this MOOC to the capacity of NNSAs to influence action on climate change. First, discussion forum conversations indicated that many individuals who participated in the course are also part of nonprofit organizations or climate change networks. As such, the exchange of technical knowledge and interaction with other participants may provide opportunities for capacity building within these organizations. Second, this MOOC may have the potential to create a new network, equipped with a particular Volume 5, September/October 2014
understanding of the climate change problem, and consisting of geographically dispersed individuals with a variety of skills and levels of influence. The scope and longevity of connections among MOOC participants remains to be seen, but the networks formed in this unique environment may contribute to the search for creative mitigation and adaptation solutions, and the articulation of sustainable futures.
CONCLUSION Responses to climate change have typically been proposed and governed at the global scale, creating false dichotomies between adaptation and mitigation, and neglecting crucial sources of innovation at the subnational level. Tools have emerged, however, through new social media and the growing momentum behind MOOCs, to convene a conversation about climate change that is increasingly diverse and potentially fruitful. In this article, we explored the importance of reframing climate change responses to consider the broader sustainability context. This is a more holistic approach that can reveal trade-offs and synergies between various responses to climate change, while opening up the possibility of a wider variety of expertise being brought to bear on this problem. ‘Climate Literacy’, a MOOC offered on the Coursera platform, provides early insights into the ways that thousands of individuals from communities around the globe can negotiate a shared understanding of desirable and feasible responses to climate change. Students participating in this class have also articulated their stories of new or increased involvement in
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locally based community activities on climate change. Global connections through a MOOC combined with increased local participation in climate change action suggest that MOOCs may lead to the creation of networks that begin to serve as NNSAs in the governance of climate change. Future work should explore the
longevity of these efforts, the challenges faced in terms of capacity, influence, and legitimacy, and other creative ways to use social media and open online education to stimulate a more robust and representative conversation about climate change responses.
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27. Geels FW. From sectoral systems of innvation to socio-technical systems: insights about dynamics and change from sociology and institutional theory. Res Policy 2004, 33:897–920.
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