Learning for a Sustainable Future (FutureLearn)

On this five-week course, you’ll develop an informed personal response to these major challenges as you’re supported to take positive actions towards a sustainable future.

You’ll learn more about current global issues and consider how we can all take action, personally or locally.

The course has an additional strand for those working in formal or informal education, who want to bring some of the activities and issues covered in the course into their own teaching.
Take action

You’ll learn practical ways to explore values and empower people to examine the ways in which they could take local action on global-scale problems.

Working in this way, starting from where you are within your own context, and sharing this with others throughout the course helps us all to develop a new and collective way of thinking for a sustainable future.
Discover how to work towards a sustainable future

You’ll build your understanding of and knowledge of sustainability and the global challenges that we face and experience within our lives, as you learn from experts at the University of Edinburgh, Learning for Sustainability Scotland and other participants on the course.

By the end of the course, you’ll be more confident and ready to take steps towards a sustainable future.

What topics will you cover?

- Disruption and Reorienting our Thoughts.

- Thinking Deeply: Values, beliefs and local issues.

- Understanding Broadly: Systems thinking and wider positioning

- Taking Action: From knowing to doing

- Futures Thinking: Reflection and planning

Learning on this course

You can take this self-guided course and learn at your own pace. On every step of the course you can meet other learners, share your ideas and join in with active discussions in the comments.

What will you achieve?

By the end of the course, you‘ll be able to...

- Explore the complex, intersectional and contested nature of sustainability.

- Discuss the importance of values in shaping personal attitudes and behaviour towards sustainability.

- Identify and share practical ways to develop opportunities to take local action on global-scale problems.

- Understand the impacts of society and culture on system-wide transformation.

- Examine education and learning techniques and share additional creative approaches to support transformative learning in life and work.

- Reflect on personal engagement and development and create and share plans for future actions.

Who is the course for?

This course is designed for anyone with an interest in sustainability – and that should be all of us, of course!

You may find the course particularly useful if you are involved in education at any level but no formal experience is required.