In today’s world, we face many complex societal challenges. Projects addressing these challenges often involve actors and stakeholders from different fields and disciplines bringing together their own perspectives or knowledge on a topic. Accordingly, collaborative transdisciplinary approaches are crucial for the success of a project.

In this course, you’ll explore how to meet the challenges of conducting effective transdisciplinary research. You’ll gain insights into a variety of case studies from different fields as you learn from the experiences of peers and experts. You’ll investigate the principles, processes, and uses of transdisciplinarity.

We will explore questions such as:

• How can we address societal challenges with research?
• What complex problems can we think of that may only be solved if several actors find a solution together?
• How can we address complex issues?

The learning outcomes for this course include:

• Developing your research skills as you investigate how to co-produce knowledge for society and academia
• Reflecting transdisciplinarity – its principles, its research processes, and the context in which it is promising
• Applying transdisciplinary approaches to societally relevant questions
• Identifying guiding questions, phases, and steps of transdisciplinary projects
• Applying the principles and steps of transdisciplinary research to examples in order to reflect the implication for own projects
• Reflecting on the role of scientists and stakeholders in society and considering the ethical implications of co-production processes

This course is for students and researchers from all backgrounds as well as stakeholders involved in searching solutions for complex societal challenges.

How to work your way through this course

Throughout the course, we invite you to consider questions or review the content. We recommend that you write down the results of these reviews and the answers to the questions from the beginning. That way you can keep track of how your knowledge changes. And should you be able to participate in one of the authors’ face-to-face courses, you can refer back to your answers and thoughts and discuss them with your peers.

td-net recommends that lecturers and heads of institutions integrate the course content into their own curricula. Students are generally very happy when inspiring online materials are provided as an addition to traditional course materials. Reflection steps may be discussed during the seminar.

We strongly recommend note-taking during your learning journey. Firstly, note-taking can aid comprehension, especially when you try to make sense of the information, paraphrase it and connect it to what you already know. Secondly, note-taking is a way to preserve new information for later study. You can refer back to your notes to remind yourself about the subject matter.

How to contact us

The Network for Transdisciplinary Research td-net of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences coordinates the team of authors of the course. General comments and suggestions can be sent to td-net@scnat.ch. Please write “tdMOOC” in your subject line. In some steps, you will be able to exchange comments with other learners on a td-net whiteboard. The td-net also organises consultation hours on selected topics.

FutureLearn

Note that this course is also published by the University of Basel on FutureLearn, in collaboration with the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences. Adapting the course to the format you are seeing here meant that we had to change certain aspects. However, there are still traces of the other format in it.

FutureLearn is a global platform that offers free online courses which profit from social learning. This means that the original course encouraged discussions between the learners. Even though a direct exchange between learners is not possible in this new format, it offers many advantages – for instance that the course content is freely accessible at all times. On FutureLearn, courses are organised into weeks, while in the format here we prefer to offer courses in chapters.

We adapted the structure and replaced the discussions by other step types where possible. However, we did not delete the mention of “weeks” or the invitations to “comment and discuss” from the videos, as we would have had to record certain materials again. So please do not get confused if the educators talk about “weeks” or invite you to “discuss” something in the comments section.