In this lesson, students will learn how mental health fits in our modern society. We will discuss how mental health and mental illness are related to each other, yet different from each other. Students will also learn about the role mental health plays in our current society, as well as current issues and trends in the field.

This course examines joint fact-finding within the context of adaptive and ecosystem-based management. Challenges and obstacles to collaborative approaches for deciding environmental and natural resource policy and the institutional changes within federal agencies necessary to utilize joint fact-finding as a means to link science and societal decisions are discussed and reviewed with scientists and managers. Senior-level federal policymakers also participate in these discussions.

Explore the key governance challenges for smart sustainable city (SSC) initiatives and the approach required. Learn to organize co-creation and to use a roadmap that support planning, implementation, close monitoring and risks mitigation.

Urban planners, policy makers and managers have an important role in making cities and communities more sustainable and resilient by incentivizing and developing smart solutions. Medellín in Colombia is a good example of how effective governance and cooperation with citizens led to the remake of the city and transformed it to a safer environment with a thriving economy. But how can those initiatives be sustained and governed? How can we deal with the challenges along the way, like effective stakeholders’ engagement, conflicting interests, decision-making under deep uncertainty, interdependent problems, spatial justice, and the transformation towards a digital society? To sum it up: building smart sustainable cities initiatives requires a strong governance capacity and new approaches!

This course will:

- provide the principles for incentivising, planning, developing and managing sustainable smart city initiatives
- present an overview of the drivers and barriers for SSC development
- present sustainability challenges and tools for SSC development
- show practical recommendations to strengthen SSC governance capacity
- introduce a smart city governance roadmap
- explain the conditions for effective stakeholder engagement and ways to organize co-creation pathways
- clarify the regulatory and legal framework for SSC including privacy and cybersecurity issues
- describe the conditions to implement digital innovation that benefit citizens including data governance
- show the importance of close monitoring and assessing SSC projects including data reliability and algorithms
- equip you with knowledge and learnings from case studies from various projects that were carried out in Latin America, next to familiarizing you with common challenges that arise in the process. These cases range from urban transportation to participatory budgeting, safety and waste management applications, but always making the connection with the governance and sustainability aspects.

The course will be moderated in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

This MOOC is a spin-off of the EU-funded Cap4City project.

This course has been developed, and will be delivered by experts in the field of Smart Sustainable Cities from twelve different universities in Latin America and Europe. You will find more information on the instructors while you navigate the course.

Institutions are structures of society that fulfill the needs of the society. Not only are they essential to the society's needs, they also help to build the society itself.

This course explores the political and historical evolution of the Soviet state and society from the 1917 Revolution to the present. It covers the creation of a revolutionary regime, causes and nature of the Stalin revolution, post-Stalinist efforts to achieve political and social reform, and causes of the Soviet collapse. It also examines current developments in Russia in light of Soviet history.

Course Sequences
Spanish IV aims at developing and improving student’s oral and written communication through the continued study of the language, literature and culture of Spain, Latin America and Hispanic communities in the United States. It also seeks to improve students’ ability to read and appreciate literary and non-literary texts in Spanish, deepening this way students’ awareness and understanding of the cultural diversity of the Spanish-speaking world. The course is organized by themes based on contemporary social, political and cultural issues of Spanish-speaking societies such as: cultural identity, the changing roles of women and family, economic development and its effects on cultural heritage and environment, and the individual’s rights in the political system.

Spanish for Bilingual Students is an intermediate course designed principally for heritage learners, but which includes other students interested  in specific content areas, such as US Latino immigration, identity, ethnicity, education and representation in the media. Linguistic goals include vocabulary acquisition, improvement in writing, and enhancement of formal communicative skills.

This course provides an introduction to the vast literature devoted to public opinion. In the next 12 weeks, we will survey the major theoretical approaches and empirical research in the field of political behavior (though we will only tangentially discuss political  participation and voting). For the most part we will focus on American public opinion, though some of the work we will read is comparative in nature.

Humans are social animals; social demands, both cooperative and competitive, structure our development, our brain and our mind. This course covers social development, social behaviour, social cognition and social neuroscience, in both human and non-human social animals. Topics include altruism, empathy, communication, theory of mind, aggression, power, groups, mating, and morality. Methods include evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology and anthropology.

The course gives knowledge of and insight into

(1) technology development from a societal perspective,
(2) a wide range of impact assessment procedures and methods to assess and regulate the potential impact of technological projects, programmes and technology policies, and
(3) ethical theories and tools to judge and manage social consequences of these initiatives.

Twentieth and twenty-first century architecture is defined by its rhetorical subservience to something called “technology.” Architecture relates to technology in multiple forms, as the organizational basis of society, as production system, as formal inspiration, as mode of temporization, as communicational vehicle, and so on. Managerial or “systems-based” paradigms for societal, industrial and governmental organization have routinely percolated into architecture’s considerations, at its various scales from the urban to the domestic, of the relationships of parts to wholes.

The concept of globalization fosters the understanding of the interconnectedness of cultures and societies geographically wide apart; America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Subject scans existing debates over globalization around the world. This course explores how globalization impacts everyday life in the First and Third World; how globalization leads to a common cosmopolitan culture; the emergence of a global youth culture; and religious, social, and political movements that challenge globalization. Materials examined include pop music, advertisements, film posters, and political cartoons.

This list presents a basic set of vocabulary words that broadly deal with issues of crime, law, and legal punishment. The words include nouns and verbs used to describe concepts and processes such as criminal, suspect, prison, and indictment. The majority of words contained within the website are nouns, and some verbs are interspersed. The words and verbs are presented in both modern standard and colloquial Egypt, and feature Arabic text and transliteration.

This course, which examines ways of resolving conflicts over the allocation of water resources, is designed to raise student awareness of the state of freshwater resources globally and the need for more effective water governance. It builds on several case studies of transboundary water conflicts in different parts of the world while also helping students develop the negotiation and mediation skills they will need to resolve water disputes.