Higher Education, <span class="small-caps">mooc</span>s, and the Question of Sustainability: An Interview with Jonathan Tomkin.

Abstract

where he also directs the undergraduate program in environmental sustainability. His research aims to uncover the processes of how changing climates, glaciers, and landscapes interact. Th is study has involved fi eldwork all over the world-including the Olympic Mountains, the Swiss Alps, Patagonia, and Antarctica. He is a coeditor and contributing author of the open-access college textbook Sustainability: A Comprehensive Foundation, available from the Open Textbook Library. Professor Tomkin also designed and teaches Introduction to Sustainability, a Coursera mooc (massive open online course), at https://www .coursera.org/course/sustain. sf: Each of the eight weeks of your mooc seems to respond to an ecological crisis a person might see in the media. "Is climate change real?" for example. Did you design it that way? jt: No! It was by accident! I thought about this word sustainability, and people said, "Well, isn't this the same thing as environmentalism, which is the same thing as ecological awareness going back to the seventies, and are we just changing the word every few years. " You've got "resilience" here-that's another one.But actually all of these terms mean diff erent things, and one of the things I fi gured out is that sustainability is diff erent from environmentalism. And the way that sustainability is diff erent is that, perversely, it's very human centric, and I think that's why it's so popular.It's really about, "How do we make our society sustainable?" It doesn't really think about the natural world except as an aft erthought, whereas environmentalism puts the natural world fi rst. So sustainability is a particular focus, and I think this is part of the reason it's so popular. It's about what most people really care about, which is ourselves.And then the next thought I had was, "All right, if that's the idea, what are the important things you have to know to be conversant with this idea?" And that's why it broke down in these areas. Maybe this is the way the information wants to be organized. sf: It's funny you say that, because when I look at the weekly breakdown of the mooc, it looks like an eight-part pbs special. jt: [Laughs ruefully] Yes, yes . . . sf: But that's a good thing! Th ere's a huge amount of data, but it has to be organized around things people are already thinking about.jt: Th at's where moocs show the value of academics. We're really curators, and I know that's a commonly used idea. But we really are curators of knowledge, and we have more knowledge than we could ever use. So many of the resources I use for the mooc-there's the online textbook, which actually gave me the idea for the structure of the class, because I was the editor and I was trying to fi gure out what I need to have covered-but so many of the resources are online. Th ere are so many free talks, and there are so many papers you can read. Th ere's so much! But if someone isn't telling you, "Th is is the thing that is worth knowing, this is the order you need to learn it so you can understand it, " then it's not acces...