The I-CHANGE MOOC: ensuring cross-fertilisation and knowledge-sharing on citizen science for climate action and risk prevention beyond European Living Labs.

The I-CHANGE project aims to demonstrate that individual behavioural change through awareness generated by citizen science activities can ultimately contribute to a collective reduction in environmental footprints. The project, which operates through Living Labs (LLs), has as one of its main challenges to take the learning accumulated in 3.5 years beyond the LLs and reach as many people as possible. To maximise the project's learnings, a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) was developed. Its objectives include enhancing knowledge of: 1) the global context of climate change, 2) critical local climate change issues and related natural hazards in each LL, 3) the significance of behavioural change, and 4) the role of citizen science in climate awareness and action, as well as accessing information produced by I-CHANGE and other open sources of citizen science data. The I-CHANGE MOOC was co-developed collaboratively by project partners and offers concise and practical lessons encapsulating key project learned lessons. 

The methodology for designing the MOOC involved a first scoping meeting, in which a preliminary table of contents was designed and feedback was received from the project partners. The table of contents was shared and improved over several months. The MOOC topics were distributed among the different LLs according to their local climate-change-related hazards, resulting in specific content about heatwaves, air pollution, and flooding authored by renowned academics. The structure of each topic has been designed innovatively, with three short sections covering the three topics: The Science (defining the issue and its causes), The Action Tools (description and utility of the technological tool used to address specific environmental challenges through citizen science) and The Change (specific actions that citizens can take to tackle this problem and successful examples from the project). 

The MOOC was a successful way to summarise key learnings, maximise the media produced in the project, and disseminate some of the dissemination outputs, including animated videos, interviews, a serious game, the Citizens4Climate dashboard, and the YetiApp for calculating environmental footprints. The production of the MOOC took a total of 8 months from the first draft to publishing the course online. Some of the challenges during the process involved synthesising a large amount of information, writing informative yet concise and engaging texts, and making decisions about accessibility and language. Challenges in the dissemination stage are associated with the number of participants expected to be reached. 

The MOOC is hosted on the Thinkific platform and became publicly available on October 24, 2024. Dissemination efforts are ongoing through the project's social media channels and European citizen science portals. To meet project goals, a target audience of 1,000 participants has been established to be monitored using Thinkific analytics. Further work will continue to disseminate the MOOC to various sectors of society. and the international English-speaking audience.