Course overview and learning with us

In this video we introduce what the course is all about and what you can expect to learn or be able to do once you’ve worked through it.

Course aims

The courses aims to provide you with:

• An introduction to key ideas and practices in global education
• An overview of current international policy and approaches
• Opportunities to meet fellow practitioners from around the world and discuss these issues with them, and
• A chance to apply your learning to your own educational practice.

The syllabus

We’ll cover a lot of ground over the three weeks of course, with the themes of each week as follows.

• Week 1: An introduction to global education, why it’s important, and what it means for teaching practice
• Week 2: Exploration of the core elements of global education and what it means for teaching and learning approaches
• Week 3: Application of learning to practice through a peer review assessment and discussion of tools and resources that can support you in future.

Learning with us

We’re keen that the course is a place for positive discussion, and all conversation should be constructive and supportive. We have some requests for course discussions:

• We expect that those who join the course will have a wealth of experience across lots of different forms of educational practice (and beyond!), but please do be aware that FutureLearn is a public platform, so you should not share any sensitive information or images, e.g. that can identify specific schools, pupils, or other individuals.
• Our diversity is a strength but these differences will also mean we have different perspectives on things! Try to avoid political, ideological, or religious references where possible and focus on the key topics we discuss.

Nevertheless, there will be many opportunities for you to discuss your experience and ideas with other learners and we encourage you to do so. We will additionally make use of a number of ‘Padlet’ online pinboards through which you can share multimedia material like links to resources, images, and so on.

Learning from you

We have designed this course to support teachers in their professional development. There is limited research on how teachers globally engage with global education and we would like to use this opportunity to gather data for research so we can better help teachers.

We plan to use the research to write academic articles and support policy makers and practitioners. Through the research we would like to explore questions like:

• How is global education perceived and practiced by teachers in different countries?
• What do teachers see as the key challenges and facilitators to global education in different contexts?
• How prepared do teachers feel to include global education in their teaching?
• What kinds of support and professional development do teachers in diverse contexts need to integrate global education into their practice?
• How do teachers reflect on their own global education journeys?

We have designed a range of activities and tools for use throughout the course to both support your learning and be used as data collection tools for research. This includes course discussions, answers to polls, and materials submitted to Padlet and Flipgrid.

In Week 3 we will also ask you to take part in an additional anonymous survey about your global education journey. It is entirely up to you whether you wish to take part and it will not affect your participation in the course. More details about the survey will be provided during that week.

Any information collected during this study will be stored and handled according to UCL’s Privacy Policy and ethical approval for the research has been sought from the UCL Institute of Education.

Please note that this is an independent research project carried out by UCL and your participation is subject to the University’s own policies and terms. FutureLearn takes no responsibility for the contents or the consequences of your participation in this study. Your participation in the research has no effect on your course progress, marks or FutureLearn profile.