Take the Science of Happiness MOOC to Change Your Habits and Activities
“The Science of Happiness” from UC Berkley’s Greater Good Science Center is a free, eight-week online course exploring a happy and meaningful life. The course is a MOOC, a Massive Open Online Course—MOOCs are a relatively new trend in distance education that aims to make education accessible to all. Traditional videos, readings, and problem sets accompany interactive user forums that attempt to engage all participants from students to TAs.
“The Science of Happiness” focuses on this finding: that happiness is inextricably linked to having strong social ties and contributing to something bigger than yourself—the greater good. Students will learn about the cross-disciplinary research supporting this view, spanning the fields of psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and beyond.
The course also offers practical strategies for nurturing happiness. It promises to deliver a new research-tested practice that fosters social and emotional well-being each week—and to help students track progress.
The course will be led by two celebrated teachers from the Greater Good Science Center: Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Ph.D.,the GGSC’s science director, and GGSC founder Dacher Keltner, Ph.D., who is a psychology professor at UC Berkeley and author of the best-selling book Born to Be Good. It will also feature guest presentations by some of the world’s leading authorities on positive psychology, including Rick Hanson, Sonja Lyubomirsky, and Jon Kabat-Zinn.
The course starts September 9, 2014. We’re signed up—are you? Click here for more info.