UNICEF Announced Free Online Course on Social Norms & Social Change
University of
Pennsylvania and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) are jointly launching a free massive open online course on social norms
and social change. The complete course, which consists of one theoretical and
one practical part á 4 weeks coursework, is taught entirely in English.
Students who already attended previous sessions of the course rated the first
part of the course with 4.5 and the second part of the course with 5.0 out of
5.0 possible points
About this course:
This is a course on social norms, the
rules that glue societies together. It teaches how to diagnose social norms,
and how to distinguish them from other social constructs, like customs or
conventions. These distinctions are crucial for effective policy interventions
aimed to create new, beneficial norms or eliminate harmful ones. The course
teaches how to measure social norms and the expectations that support them, and
how to decide whether they cause specific behaviors. The course is a joint
Penn-UNICEF project, and it includes many examples of norms that sustain
behaviors like child marriage, gender violence and sanitation practices. This
is Part 1 of the Social Norms, Social Change series. In these lectures, I
introduce all the basic concepts and definitions, such as social expectations
and conditional preferences, that help us distinguish between different types
of social practices like customs, descriptive norms and social norms.
Expectations and preferences can be measured, and these lectures explain how to
measure them. Measurement is crucial to understanding the nature of the
practice you are facing, as well as whether an intervention was or was not
successful, and why. In Part 2, we will put into practice all we have learned
in Part 1
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