Becoming Human MOOC (Open2Study)

In 2013, Open Universities Australia launched my MOOC (‘Massive’ Online Open Classroom), ‘Becoming Human: Anthropology,’ as part of Open2Study. Since then, over 6000 students have registered for the course, which has some of the highest completion rates and satisfaction scores among all MOOCs (if you ask me, it’s because it’s shorter and more focused than many, but here are the reviews). Here’s the brief course description:

Impressively, humans are the only creatures produced by evolution that are capable of understanding evolution. In Becoming Human: Anthropology, you can explore how evolution works and how variation arises.

Find out why, of all the orders of life, primates produced us. How did apes start to look like us, walk on two feet and grow big brains that over the past 200,000 years have figured out where we came from? This course will give you some thought-provoking answers.

Click here if you’d like to see when the next session starts (they run more than a half dozen times each year).

 

2 thoughts on “Becoming Human MOOC (Open2Study)

  1. I stumbled across your essay discussing the phenomenon of the WEIRD bias in psychology, which led me to your homepage, which then led me to excitedly wanting to enroll in your Becoming Human MOOC. However, it seems to longer be available. Do you have any updates on the course – was it simply moved or removed altogether?

    • Cara, I’m afraid it was removed without any warning. I have contacted my university’s administration to see if they can address the problem, but I haven’t gotten any response. It has been a hard time for us at Neuroanthropology — two sites that featured our work have been taken down in the last year, even though they were with really reputable organisations!

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