The challenge of widening citizen participation in climate change education: developing open educational resources on the lived experiences of climate change

If climate change education is to become more than self-serving and contribute to meeting the global challenge of sustainable development, it must broaden its scope to include a wider range of students in terms of age, social group and ethnicity than is usually the case. In this paper the authors discuss how open and flexible learning can apply its strengths in the area of widening participation, as it can lever years of experience with non-traditional target groups. They show how flexible learning universities, such as Open Universities, may offer their curriculum as open educational resource (OER) for these types of learning and can indeed contribute for achieving such a needed critical mass. Mass education of this type may have a key role to play in meeting any global challenge, and climate change is no exception. In this paper, the authors exemplify it through an exploration of a partnership project between eight European universities in developing the LECH-e materials for a Master’s curriculum on the lived experiences of climate change.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The lived experience of sustainable learning: the LECH-e OER Project bridging formal and non formal lifelong learners

The Erasmus-funded Lived experience of climate change: e-learning and virtual mobility (LECH-e) project is developing learning resources on the topic of climate change that will be openly accessible on the web for higher education institutions and the wider world public to use and adapt. Institutions are free to integrate the resources into their formal programs and non-formal courses. A description of the project is provided in a short prologue. In this paper we depict the open learning strategy implemented by the LECH-e partnership and how it can contribute to widening participation in environmental, and specifically climate change, education

The lived experience of sustainable learning: the Leche-e OER project bridging formal and non formal lifelong learners

Project LECHE-e - 2009-3532/001-001info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

TNF-α promoter polymorphisms, production and susceptibility to multiple sclerosis in different groups of patients

TNF-α production in whole blood cultures upon stimulation with LPS was determined in 179 individuals from 61 families in order to characterise the magnitude of inherited differences in TNF-α production. The three families characterised by highest TNF production showed 7.1 ± 0.3 ng TNF/ml upon culture with 10 ng LPS and 10.2 ± 0.2 ng TNF/ml upon culture with 1000 ng LPS, in contrast to the three families characterised by the lowest TNF production that showed a production of 1.6 ± 0.1 ng TNF upon culture with 10 ng and 2.5 ± 0.2 ng/ml upon culture with 1000 ng LPS/ml. This difference could not be attributed to the promoter polymorphisms -308 G to A, -238 G to A or -376 G to A, although the -238 GA donors produced 2.1 ± 0.9 ng TNF upon culture with 10 ng endotoxin compared to 3.2 ± 2.2 ng TNF for the -238 GG donors. In line with these results the frequency of the -238 GG genotype was increased in hospitalized MS patients in a nursing home (100% 238GG, n = 57) compared to MS patients in an outpatient's clinic (94% 238GG, n = 98) or Dutch controls (90% 238GG, n = 180). These results suggest that the -238 GG genotype is differently distributed in hospitalized MS patients in a nursing home