1. In response to the growing number of confirmed cases of Coronavirus, people around the world are being forced to rethink and reorganize their daily lives to reduce the risk of contagion. Schools, offices, sports facilities, bars and restaurants are all closed and people are mainly at home. Covid is also stressing the world of Higher Education as universities and colleges face the problem of guaranteeing educational services when access to the physical spaces of learning are closed. In such exceptional global circumstances, adopting an online strategy enables the ongoing semester to continue. To support the IPSA community of Professors and students as they marshal an almost real-time response to the call for online learning, we share some useful links to quality open educational resources in Political Science. (e-learning on the IPSAPortal).

 

2. Leading scholars from the IPSA community itself joined ranks with Federica Weblearning – Centre for Innovation and Creation of Multimedia Learning at the University of Naples – to produce 7 courses on key aspects of Political Science: Comparative Political Systems, Contemporary Issues in World Politics, Democracy and Autocracy, Understanding Political Concepts, Comparative Research Designs and Methods, Global Politics, Introducción a la teoría política. Individually these form indispensable chunks of insight into the changing nature of democracy and other contemporary political issues. Together the first five courses form a core curriculum that provides useful food for thought and discussion in these turbulent times. IPSAMOOC XSeries and Courses are available on the edX platform.

 

3. Other highlights from the MOOC environment. 

The Coursera platform offers a range of relevant courses like Moral Foundations of Politics from Yale, Understanding International Relations Theory from Russian National Research School of Economics, Chinese Politics (part 1 and part 2) from Hong Kong Business School, plus more courses on Global Diplomacy, Globalisation, Economic growth and Stability.

 

Futurelearn, the British platform, provides access to courses like Propaganda and Ideology in everyday life from the University of Nottingham and British Library, Global Resource Politics from the Hanyang University, Religion and Conflict from the University of Groningen and Religion, Radicalization, Resilience from the European University Institute.

 

Apart from these MOOC initiatives, elite institutions also share their courseware to promote interest in their brand. Harvard offers a selection of online political science courses from Policy Design and Delivery to Leadership and Ethics and Public Narrative. MIT similarly offers a range of political science resources including global justice, political thought, political economy of globalization all taught by leading faculty. The courses are available on the MIT OpenCourseware platform, which, in 2003, was the first open courseware initiative, and the one that triggered the OER movement (Courseware on the IPSAPortal).