Aalto Climate.Now course development with educational games

Overview

Aalto Climate.now course is Aalto-version of the Climate.now MOOC-course which is a general course on climate change available for use in all universities in Finland. The online MOOC-material Ilmasto.nyt / Climate.now was developed in collaboration of several universities and Sitra, and it was published in 2016. The Aalto Climate.now course has been open for all Aalto students. It has attracted students from all schools with about 100 enrolled students each year. The course has proven to be interesting and accessible for students regardless their study background.

The main learning purposes of the course are to 1) learn the basics of climate change, 2) reflect how climate change is related to the students own field of study and 3) discuss and learn with other students in multidisciplinary groups. The multidisciplinarity as such and especially in the context of climate change is the main learning outcome: the course makes it clear that all fields are needed in solving the climate change crisis, and effective mitigation needs co-operation between different fields and multidisciplinary thinking.

In the pilot, we develop further the course by implementing an online returning system for assignments and learning diary. This makes possible to run the course with larger student amounts and also as a fully online version. We will also introduce climate change educational games to the course.

Goal state after the pilot:

• the course can host 200 or more students with reasonable amount of teacher and assistant work
• students will get feedback on their assignments and project works
• assignments evaluated partly by peer-evaluation
• fully online implementation of the course is possible, this could also be offered as Aalto MOOC outside the university
• games increase student motivation and deepen their understanding of the climate change problematic as a complex problem that needs systemic thinking and collaboration for the best solutions.