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.

The first course will teach students how to make the distinction between social norms and 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 discusses several issues that are closely related to human rights such as child marriage, gender violence and sanitation practices.

The second part of the course will examine social change, the tools that might be used to enact change and put into practice everything that has been learnt in the first part of the course.

While both course parts are available for free, those who want to receive a Penn-UNICEF certification can opt-in for a paid verified certificate.