Abstract:

In 2013, the University of Nottingham offered its first NOOC (Nottingham Open Online Course), called ‘Perspectives on Sustainability’. Using pedagogies drawn from online learning and ‘MOOCs’, the NOOC aimed to provide an opportunity for our global community of students and staff to learn together around a strategic priority area for the institution.

We chose a differentiated outcomes model in which anyone with a University of Nottingham computer username (students and staff of all categories from our campuses in the UK, China and Malaysia) could enrol for personal or professional development, could choose to complete activities towards a ‘Certificate of Achievement’ signed by the Vice Chancellor, or could meet the requirements for credits towards Nottingham’s co-curricular skills and employability ‘Advantage Award’.

The NOOC generated positive feedback and healthy numbers. From October 2014 it is available for degree-credit too as a first year undergraduate elective. This marks a significant move from the co-curriculum to the formal academic curriculum and reflects a growing interest in educational innovations or ‘positive disruptions’ supporting cross-campus interdisciplinary and intercultural learning.

Following the first run of the NOOC (March-June 2013), we carried out a series of qualitative studies exploring student responses to learning online and to interdisciplinary learning for sustainability. In this paper we report some of our findings around student presentation of self, student-staff interaction, and cognitive engagement. We consider the opportunities and barriers suggested by this research and recap on some of the changes already made in response to subsequent versions of the course.

Keywords:

Online, sustainability, MOOCs, interaction, interdisciplinary.