USE OF MOOCS FOR SPREADING KNOW-HOW ON CIRCULAR ECONOMY AND ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY

The European Union Action Plan for the "Circular Economy Package" (2015) means the opportunity to transform the current economy paradigm and generate new and sustainable competitive advantages for Europe. However, ensuring a successful transition to the circular economy requires efforts on many different fronts and does not stop with delivering on actions put forward by the institution. The main driver of this transformation is a qualified workforce with positive attitude for acquiring new skills, in order to harness opportunities for employment and social dialogue. Since the key is to quickly and efficiently convey the new outlines of the sustainable economic development, specific platforms are needed for communication, dissemination and awareness-raising on the principles of circular economy and more specifically on awareness of use versus possession. In this sense, we believe that (Massive Open Online Courses) MOOCs are efficient for diffusion of new knowledge. MOOCs are based on connecting knowledge nodes and thus, if the number of nodes is greater, there is more possibility of incorporating new ideas for innovation.
The objective of this work is to show the experience of a multidisciplinary group, applying methodologies based on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), sponsored by an internal initiative of learning-teaching innovation project, to achieve an efficient dissemination of the new knowledge (Circular Economy) in a timely and agile manner.
We analyze the methodology efficacy for spreading the knowhow among a broad spectrum of the population, both in terms of geographic differences and educational level via the implementation of a MOOC entitled “Environmental sustainability of organizations in the circular economy” developed by Universidad San Jorge (USJ). Since sustainability is a cross-cutting theme in various disciplines of formal education, to construct the circular economy MOOC project it was necessary to arrange a multidisciplinary team, involving teachers from different faculties and schools of USJ. On this way, in the practice development, experts from environmental science, chemistry, laws and engineering were involved. Consequently, due to these different research profiles, a high coordination was required in organization of contents and homogeneity in the methodology applied.
As a result, from MOOC prototypes we have undergo in USJ, some actions have be derived to be included in specific communication campaigns on Circular Economy principles for citizenship, business sector and education sector (university, vocational training and schools). Thus these initiatives are adequate to be included in both, formal and continuing education programs. This involve re-imagining curricula and ways of teaching, conducting research across traditional subject silos to develop new technologies and business practices that work at the systems level. Therefore, results will orientate the design of future formal educational projects in USJ. Moreover, these project results lead us to believe that the relentless shift from closed educational platforms to open learning environments is going to benefit thousands of people around the world to quickly access new trends, procedures and success stories in so incipient topics as circular economy.