Uni Tasmania has a new MOOC to help people with Parkinson’s “live their best possible lives.”
The massive open on-line course comes from the Wicking dementia research centre and Menzies IMR at the university. It includes information on risk, symptoms, medical and allied health treatments, plus accounts of their experience from peoples with Parkinson’s. The Parkinson’s Research Foundation and venture philanthropy fund Miriax stumped up the $25,000 cost.
Menzies co-lead Michele Callisaya says she used her lived experience of the disease to develop content and address misunderstandings, including the way brain changes signal its arrival long before problems with movement appear. Early symptoms can be fatigue loss of sensed of smell and anxiety.
The MOOC adds to the great U Tas tradition of on-line education products that help enormous numbers of people around the world. Wicking’s current catalogue includes two MOOCs on dementia, one on traumatic brain injury and another on Motor Neurone Disease. Wicking
And when Wicking says they are open it means as in open to everybody everywhere without charge – Wicking Director James Vickers says enrolments across the range are over 760 000, 60 per cent in Australia.
As a way of helping people who need open access to reliable information on scary to terrifying life-changes these MOOCs are hard to beat and the cost per subscriber makes then a natural for public information campaigns, information rich and easily accessed Government health agencies could make a bunch of them for way less than the costs of a public interest TVC/social media campaign.
And yet they don’t – it is a great opportunity missed.
