Money and Society MOOC – starts again August 20th 2017!

This is a trailer of the first minutes of lesson one of the Money and Society MOOC: a free online course at Masters-level will enable you to understand the past, present and future role of money in society. The MOOC runs for one month, with four lessons. Each lesson begins on a Monday, consisting of an audio Powerpoint of two hours, followed by two hours of personal reading and one hour to prepare a written assignment of not more than 400 words, which must be submitted by that Thursday.

Participants can view and comment on each other’s assignments in the forum, and can interact as they wish, with tutors commenting on assignments in the forum. Lessons Two and Four are followed by one hour webinars with the tutors, which occur on Saturday mornings at 10am. The first iteration begins February 2015, and the next will be in quarter three of 2015.

The following text is reposted from the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability:

A free online course at Masters-level will enable you to understand the past, present and future role of money in society. The 5th cohort starts 20th August 2017 and lasts 8 weeks (one lesson every two weeks). Enrol here.

The course is therefore highly interdisciplinary, drawing upon anthropology, sociology, history and heterodox economics. It is designed by Professor Jem Bendell PhD (IFLAS) and Matthew Slater BD (Community Forge), with additional tutoring by Leander Bindewald MA (IFLAS).

Typically 50 to 100 people complete the full 4 lessons, and many then continue to interact in the Alumni Forum. Over 20 have progressed to attend the full certificate course in London.

The next offering of the MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) starts online on August 20th 2017 and runs for over 2 months, with four lessons:

Lesson One: An introduction to money: functions, forms, and fallacies

Lesson Two: The history of money and its discontents

Lesson Three: The problems with mainstream monetary systems

Lesson Four: Alternatives

Each lesson begins on a Sunday, consisting of a audio-narrated slides of less than two hours (which you can listen to when you want within the following days), followed by two hours of personal reading and one hour to prepare a written assignment of around 500 words, which must be submitted by the following week.

Participants can view and comment on each other’s assignments in the forum, and can interact as they wish, with tutors commenting on assignments in the forum.

Lessons Two and Four are followed by one hour webinars with the tutors, which occur on Saturday mornings at 10am (UK time). You need access to a decent broadband connection but do not need any special software to engage in the course. If without a powerpoint viewer, participants can view lessons on youtube. Participants cannot start the MOOC late.

Sign up at http://mooc1.communityforge.net The next offering of the MOOC after August will be in February 2018.

At the end of this MOOC you will be able to:

  • Critically assess views on the form and function of money and currency by drawing from monetary theories
  • Explain theories on how social, economic and environmental problems arise from mainstream monetary systems
  • Explain alternative forms of money and currency and the theories on how they can support better social, economic and environmental outcomes.

The full schedule follows below. On the MOOC you will be joined by participants on the Certificateof Achievement in Sustainable Exchange, which is a credit-bearing module offered by the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability at the University of Cumbria. Four days of classes in person at the Docklands Campus in London begin in April 2017, featuring Professor Bendell, Leander Bindewald and a range of guest lecturers. These classes explore the wider issues of currency innovation and the collaborative economy. There is a fee for the certificate, not the MOOC. You must have started the MOOC in order to enrol.

The Tutors 

Matthew Slater is a software engineer who specialises in open source software for community currencies. Co-founder of Community Forge, which produces software for and hosts over 100 local currencies, he is a regular commentator on grassroots initiatives for community control of currency and credit.

Leander Bindewald is the coordinator of the EU funded project Complementary Currencies in Action, and a regular commentator on currency innovation.

Photo by Sole Treadmill

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