Posted on 31 January 2023 by BaerbelW

The next iteration of our free online course, Making Sense of Climate Science Denial, starts on February 7 2023 and it will be the 16th run since the very first one in April 2015. Since then, more than 42,000 students from over 180 countries have registered for our MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) which has been running either as a 7 weeks long paced or - more often - a longer running self-paced version like the upcoming one. The next run will be available for almost 13 months until end of February 2024, giving you ample time to work through the material at your own pace.

To explore our MOOC in detail, please click on the graphic below to open an interactive PDF file created for a conference presentation in 2021.

Our MOOC is a collaboration between Skeptical Science and The University of Queensland and takes an interdisciplinary look at climate science denial. We explain the psychological drivers of denial, debunk many of the most common myths about climate change and explore the scientific research into how to respond to climate misinformation. With all the misinformation and outright lies still getting spread about climate science - not to mention many other topics in this age of fake news - our MOOC will give you the knowledge to spot and the tools to effectively counter them.

A poster about Denial101x has been presented at various conferences and you can glean at least a rough idea about our MOOC's content from it (click the image for a larger version or download the poster as a PDF-file, but with 26MB it's fairly large):

We've received some wonderful feedback from students who've taken the course, particularly teachers who are using our course videos in their classes. Pat Bowden wrote a neat review about Denial101x for her blog in November 2017 and Corinne Esteryn spent a lot of time and effort to create very detailed course notes. Corinne also shared this feedback about Denial101x with us when she took it:

"This was the 1st MOOC I ever took and though I took many since, it remains my favorite. So many valuable information, from so many field experts, from all around the world, so much editing work in the videos, to make them as short as possible, yet packed with all the essential & accessible information. So many references. Such an outstanding amount of work, dedication, and all quite methodic and serious. Thank you to all the team for this great experience and all the knowledge shared!"

Here is a video compilation of some feedback from students:

Another incentive to take Denial101x is that successfully completing it offers the opportunity to apply for the Skeptical Science Fellowship, a program that provides training and mentoring in climate communication and debunking misinformation. Anyone who completes the program will be listed as a Skeptical Science Fellow. To qualify, you need to successfully complete Denial101x and internalise the principles of effective debunking in order to apply them during the Fellowship. To find out more about the Skeptical Science Fellowhip, please read John Cook’s blog post announcing it. And if we piqued your interest, please sign up for the Fellowship via this google form once you've successfully completed our MOOC (this by the way also applies to finishing earlier runs of Denial101x).

You can sign up for free via the edX website.

Hope to see you there!