Improvement of attitudes and skills using a MOOC about the basic science of climate change

Education needs to be at the forefront of efforts to mitigate and adapt to climate change (CC). The authors introduce the Climate Change Competence (C3) to provide a comprehensive way to include sustainability and CC in curricula. This paper analyses how primary and secondary teachers can improve C3 using a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on the basic science of CC. Beyond expected gains in knowledge, the study observes important advances in abilities and attitudes essential for teaching CC mitigation and adaptation. Using a pre-experimental pre- and post-test design with a sample of 530 students, the authors find that while the MOOC focuses on the science of CC, participants also advance in attitudes and abilities, revealing an important correlation among the three competence dimensions. The MOOC improves C3 in all participants, with diverse effects across different groups.