Monday 2 March 2015

TCD to re-run successful Irish History MOOC

Trinity College Dublin (TCD) will be repeating its very successful free online course, Irish Lives in War and Revolution: Exploring Irelands History 1912-1923, from 16 March.

Run in partnership with FutureLearn, a company wholly-owned by The Open University, this course was TCD's first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) when it launched last year; some 15,000 would-be students signed up to take part.

The course looks beyond the familiar names and the famous faces and instead explores how the events that shaped the nature of modern Ireland - the Great War, the Easter Rising, the Irish war of independence and civil war - were experienced by the people who lived through them or in spite of them.

Professor Ciaran Brady, Dr Anne Dolan and Dr Ciarán Wallace from the department of History will lead the course. It is delivered through videos, assignments and discussions and is available to anyone with Internet access across multiple devices including desktops, tables and smartphones.

It's free, runs over six weeks and requires a weekly commitment of five hours study.

Learners need no prior knowledge of the subject, just a basic interest in Irish and modern European history as well as a curiosity about how conflict shapes civil society.

There's a 3-minute trailer and more details here.