Massive Open Online Courses Role in Promoting United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

<p>Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have the potential to become a convenient channel for learning United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) due to their popularity. However, only scattered studies have explored the adoption of SDG contents in MOOCs. The main purpose of this study is to investigate how SDGs have been taught in Coursera MOOCs. Machine learning techniques were used to classify 2818 Coursera MOOCs with SDGs. The model is trained using the training dataset from the OSDG public community and is then used to classify MOOCs based on the open course description on the website. The prediction results are initially displayed in the form of the probability that each course belongs to each SDG and then processed with the Z-score to decide the final SDG labels for each course. The main contribution of this study is showing an overview of the proportion of different SDGs in different universities/countries/continents on MOOCs of Coursera, and providing a good reference for communities to plan for future MOOC design involving SDGs in the discussions.</p>