Climate change and e-learning: interdisciplinarity and interculturality challenges

Climate change is a key issue on today’s scientific, social and political agenda. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals reinforce its current priorities in this regard (e.g. SDG 13 Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts) and is one of the five priority areas of the Strategy 2020 of the European Commission. This chapter discusses the specificities of climate change online learning in respect to syllabus contents and highlights its multidisciplinary and multicultural components. One of the characteristics of online learning is its capacity to reach an extensive number of people, scattered around the world and with diversified cultural backgrounds. This opens an extremely valuable path to research and societal responsibility, filled with potentialities and challenges. Student’s cultural diversity and geographical belonging must be reflected in the syllabus contents, as well as in the objectives of the courses and in the competencies that should be promoted. Furthermore in the design of the courses it is increasingly relevant to reflect and value an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning, because it is a key factor in Climate Change Education and Awareness. In this interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary dialog, it is crucial to evidence the cultural and contextual validity of knowledge and the impact of socioenvironmental dimensions in the configuration of Climate change challenges. For the purpose of this study we took as an example two course proposals: “Environment, Health and Wellbeing” for social sciences undergraduate students and “Governance of Climate Change Adaptation” for postgraduate students, presenting teaching contents, teaching and learning methodologies, effectiveness through e-learning in higher education institutions (HEIs) and the potential for increase in public climate science literacy.

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