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Two free online courses (MOOCs) from WUR in worldwide edX top 10

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November 22, 2019

Two Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) given by Wageningen University & Research (WUR) are among the ten best in the world. The courses are The Science of Beer and Sustainable Tourism: Rethinking the Future. Unfortunately, they were not awarded the title of best MOOC of 2019. This prize was given to a course on programming in Linux created by the French ParisTech and Dartmouth University in the United States. The prize winner received 5000 euros.

MOOCs are video courses that can be followed for free by anyone with an internet connection. In 2019 about 2600 MOOCs started on the global platform edX, which is the second largest platform for MOOCs. Ten video courses, including two from WUR, were selected from this group to compete for the prize of best MOOC of 2019.

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All about beer

In The Science of Beer everything is explained about the most widely consumed alcoholic beverage: how and from what it is made, how the supply chain works, how it is sold and what effect beer has on your body. This MOOC was created entirely by students Sander Breevaart, Florence Scherer, Nico van der Veen and Esther Kunst.

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Rethinking tourism

The video lectures in Sustainable Tourism: Rethinking the Future are given by Arjaan Pellis, lecturer in Cultural Geography. Course participants are taught skills that enable them to take a different look at the current development of the tourism industry. Participants are simultaneously invited to consider ways of making the future of this sector more sustainable.

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Academic instruction for everyone

Thanks to MOOCs academic instruction is available to everyone. The video lectures cover a wide range of subjects: nutrition and health, sustainable food production, animal behaviour, landscape development, tourism, sustainable urban development or biobased engineering. WUR has created more than 40 MOOCs, which have been followed by more than 700,000 participants to date.