Tag: MOOCs

Showcase MOOC: Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems

Supported by Innovedum, a new Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is happy to introduce itself: The new ETHZ Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) series entitled “Designing Resilient Regenerative Systems” (DRRS) directly addresses sustainability transitions in complex systems as for dealing with nested crises. Professor Tobias Luthe tells us about his new MOOC and why it’s so exciting.

The DRRS MOOC series hybridizes sustainability science, systemic design and transformative action. It provides worldviews, tools, illustrations and transformative networks to build capacities and engage in systemic innovation of complex systems. The MOOC series is featuring a virtual-real didactic concept, where local physical social outdoor action in the region the participant lives, is stimulated and incubated by virtual means. 

The learning content is focused on stimulating new cultures beyond the current often disciplinary and compartmentalized approach to science: for hybridizing the analytical tools of science with the iterative doing of design, and the urge for transformative action. And this across spatial and governance scales, from green chemistry, materials, products, buildings, cities, landscapes, regions and transnational cooperation.

The MOOCs’ didactics are designed to combine time and place independent virtual learning through pre-recorded conversations and presentations, both accessible as movies and audio files, readings, and practical engagement outside in nature. Virtual content is meant to stimulate physical and social interaction in the bio-region where the participant lives. Systemic Cycles takes the participants on a conscious exploration of place and regional supply chain actors on their bicycle, to playfully learn systemic design methods, to weave together local and regional networks and to explore the inner self through physical activity. An accompanying visual mapping process called Gigamapping acts as a designerly way to co-create your own learning journey and connect across the MOOC series to your final transformative design project. Your personal QUEST guides you through your learning journey. Weekly live tutorials in an online forum offer opportunities to discuss and brainstorm with teachers. Participants learn together with diverse experts in their field – sustainability scientists, systemic designers, consultants, local and European politicians, book authors, builders, mountain guides, self-compassion trainers, and together co-create and connect communities of practice for learning and engagement opportunities Starting May 9th 2022 on EdX – free participation w/o costs possible.

Exciting real-world illustrations will take participants to Hemsedal Norway, Annecy France, Ostana Italy, and Mallorca Spain – from material supply chains, to products, buildings, communities and their services, to landscapes, bio-regions, and transnational cooperation. This offers a comparative understanding of communities and regions undergoing sustainability transitions across different contexts, cultures, climates and geographies.  

The prominent methods participants will learn are systemic design and systems-oriented design, social network analysis, resilience assessment, life cycle and footprint analysis, circularity mapping, visual dialogue, cross-scale design, “view from above” perspectives, biomimicry, transdisciplinary research, real-world elaboration – and how this “cocktail” of methods becomes part of new cultures to deal with complexity and uncertainty. 

For more information on this MOOC visit:  https://systemicdesignlabs.ethz.ch/drrs-mooc/

We would be happy to talk with you about our experiences in making this MOOC!

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Learning Autonomy with Self-Driving Cars: Duckietown goes MOOC.

Figure  1 Tani (left) and Censi (right) in the Duckietown Lab
(Picture: ETH, Alessandro della Bella)

Jacopo Tani and Andrea Censi are senior assistants in the research group headed by Emilio Frazzoli (D-MAVT), an internationally renowned specialist in autonomous systems. Together with Prof. Liam Paull of the University of Montreal, they lead the Duckietown project, which was conceived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2015. The goal was to build a platform that was small-scale and cute yet still preserved the real scientific challenges inherent in a full-scale real autonomous robot platform.  Duckietown is now a worldwide initiative to realize a new vision for AI/robotics education. It teaches participants to programme autonomous vehicles to navigate a structured environment using rubber ducks as the passengers of the vehicles, and has now been used by over 80 universities in 23 countries worldwide. Their next endeavor is to create a series of massive open online courses (MOOCs) focused on the science and technology of autonomy through the lens of self-driving cars. In this multi-institution project, ETH will take leadership and develop the first course of the MOOC-series.

What will the MOOC be about and what do you seek to achieve for participants?

The Duckietown MOOC series will be about autonomy, or how to make machines take their own decisions to accomplish broadly defined tasks. This topic is both intellectually fascinating and very timely given the rapid progress of robotics and AI technologies in our daily lives. Autonomy will be studied through self-driving cars, an application with disruptive social potential.

Participants will engage in a sequence of software and hardware hands-on learning experiences whose particular focus is on overcoming the challenges of deploying robots in the real world. Our hope is that participants will gain useful skills and come to appreciate and understand the challenges of this technology, while at the same time having lots of fun!

What motivated you personally to make a MOOC?

The Duckietown project was developed to make the science and technology of autonomy accessible to the broadest possible audience, not only to those learners lucky enough to have access to premiere educational institutions where these topics are addressed. Building a Duckietown MOOC experience was a logical step towards achieving the mission of the project. We are grateful for ETH-Innovedum supporting our efforts and extremely excited to bring our vision for learning autonomy to the world.   

What are the unique didactic challenges?

Teaching autonomy requires a fundamentally different approach compared to many computer science and engineering disciplines. There is extensive and diverse preliminary knowledge needed to really comprehend autonomy from the “pure” mathematics and physics to “modern” machine learning based approaches. Moreover, robots are real world machines, and theory and practice do not always play well together. To see the theory work in the real world it is necessary to translate the knowledge in software architectures, and deploy them on hardware platforms. Finally, there is a proliferation of hardware platforms and software tools out there, each with its own peculiarities, strengths and shortcomings. It is not always clear what tools are worth investing time in mastering, and how this competence will translate to different platforms.   

 How will you overcome these challenges?

To address these barriers of entry to learning autonomy, the MOOC “Self-Driving Cars with Duckietown” will have several distinguishing features, namely:

  • Competency-based topic progression
    The sequence of topics in the courses is determined by asking the question: “what is the most we can make our robot do, with the least amount of prior knowledge?” instead of “what is the best order to explain things?”. As learners progress through behaviors of increasing complexity to reach the final objective, it becomes naturally necessary to introduce new concepts and tools to address limitations to previous behaviors. This approach allows students to jump right in “the middle of things” (getting Duckiebots to do things!) and gradually re-iterate concepts through the various technical frameworks and implementation solutions that are so very important to align the theory with the practice, leading to a stronger comprehension of the how and why things happen.
  • Hardware-based hands-on learning on a standardized platform (the Duckiebot) with open-source industry-widespread software tools
    This is a robotics and AI MOOC where every participant will have the opportunity to follow along by doing real world experiments with their own robot at home. The Duckietown framework was designed, from the software stack (i.e., Python, ROS, Docker) to the Duckiebot and Duckietown city, to make the course accessible for all learners, both pedagogically and economically.
  • Remote evaluations of hardware assignments
    The last, but not least, distinguishing factor of this MOOC is the use of remote facilities (the Duckietown Autolabs) where reproducible performance assessment of hardware assignments is conducted in controlled environments. This feature enables remote grading of hardware assignment, which, to the best of our knowledge, is a first ever for a robotics MOOC.

Like to know more about Autonomy with Self-Driving Cars? Course starts at March 22, 2021 and will be published on the edX-platform.

Inspired to start your own MOOC project? Please have a look at our website and contact Marinka Valkering to discuss possibilities!

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ETHZ & WSL announce first MOOC on Landscape Ecology

What is a landscape? How has it evolved? How do we perceive landscapes?

In this MOOC participants learn theory, methods and tools to understand the landscapes we live in and to solve landscape-related environmental problems.  Leading landscape ecologists present case studies from around the world, where research in landscape ecology is needed, both to improve our understanding of land-use systems and to guide land managers in their decisions.

Join us at https://www.edx.org/course/landscape-ecology.

Course start Sep 10, 2018, by Prof. Felix Kienast and Dr. Gregor Martius

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Responsive Cities or Webcartography?

In May two new ETH-MOOCs will start. Please feel free to join these courses!

 

Responsive cities define the future of urbanization.

Learn how responsive citizens use smart technology to contribute to planning, design and management of their cities! “Responsive Cities is a self-paced course and will be open from the first of May 2018 till January 2019.

 

Want to produce cartographic visualizations to better communicate the results of your project or research? Or you are just interested in using modern web technologies for cartographic purposes?

Then Webcartography II is the course for you! Starts May 15.

Take the opportunity to communicate with learners from all over the world about webcartography or responsive cities! For more details about these two courses and other ETH-MOOCs: https://www.edx.org/school/ethx.

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