Thursday, June 09, 2016

New Global Systems Science MOOC

A new MOOC has just gone live on the OU's FutureLearn platform.  It is called Global Systems Science and Policy: an Introduction.  "Learn how Global Systems Science can inform and model the impact of social, economic, political and environmental policy making." 

The authors' claims for the MOOC are to "Understand the four main elements of Global Systems Science.....This free online course will help you understand the four main elements of Global Systems Science, and how they can work together to create better formulated policy with better outcomes:  

 1. Policy at all levels, from individuals to the world: we will begin with policy problems at global and national scales. How can these problems be tackled? How can we know which, if any, proposed policy options will work.

2. The new, interdisciplinary approach: we will explore how the science of complex social, economic, political, biological, physical and environmental systems can inform policy makers in their work.

3. Data science and computational modelling for policy makers: we will look at so-called “policy informatics” – the new, policy-oriented methods of modelling complex systems on computers.

4. Citizen engagement: a central concept of GSS is that the behaviour of social systems emerges bottom-up, from the interactions of individuals and institutions, in the context of top-down policy constraints. We will explore what this means in practice – why individual citizens must be involved in decision making and policy formulation."

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