Future of Food: Environmental Sustainability (APS-50803)

This course is meant for MSc-1 students who are interested in the topic of the course and lack sufficient knowledge in integrating disciplines and/or systems thinking analysis from any study program within Wageningen University.

Introduction

Food is essential in your daily life. Your daily food choices do not only affect your health, but also have an impact on our planet. For example, how much land, energy and nutrients are needed to produce various foods? And which pollutants are emitted to the air and water while producing these foods? To address such issues, you need to understand the complexity of food production systems and to be able to critically evaluate their environmental sustainability. In this course you will learn to apply the principles of systems thinking to food production systems, particularly in relation to their environmental impact. This knowledge is essential if you wish to engage yourself in developing environmental friendly food production.

Activities

The course is offered as an online course supported by the education platform Edx. The course is open all year. The course contains no scheduled activities, students can follow the course anytime. After registration for the course via SSC, a student will receive an email with instructions from the course provider Edx.edge. The course is facilitated by moderators and there is limited online contact with the lecturers.

The course compared to the MOOC

The online course APS50803 is a regular course of Wageningen University & Research. Although this course looks similar to the MOOC Systems thinking and environmental sustainability, it is different because in comparison to the MOOC, the course APS50803 contains a study load of approximately 14 hours due to additional assignments, assignments for grading and an written exam to obtain 3 ECTS.

Assignments, exams, and grading

The online course will be open from the 4 September 2017 until 16 August 2018. The examination contains the assignments for grading of this online course (40%; minimum 5.5 on average) and a written exam on campus (60%; minimum 5.5). At that point, if you have scored higher than 55% on the graded assignments, you will receive a passing grade for this part of the course and be eligible to receive certificate.

Students that did not obtain a sufficient grade for the online assignments for grading and peer review of essay have to answer additional questions given at the written exam (Part 2 of the exam) of the course. The next available exam date(s) are published in the course schedule.

More information available at the study handbook, or via mail