In addition, we contributed toward the planting of Jewish National Fund trees in Israel. If we thought about it at all, we might have imagined a bunch of Israeli trees swaying happily in the Mediterranean breezes, but in reality, the content of the holiday was distant.

More recently, Tu B’shevat has become the rallying cry for Jewish environmentalists who have used the holiday to raise awareness of ecology, the environment and the responsibility of the Jewish community — as a society which has always valued the earth that God gave us — to spearhead the drive towards a more activist approach to environmental responsibility.

Last year I taught an online class to a group of 7th graders in Deerfield Illinois via an online Jewish/Israel education project, JETS Israel. As Tu B’Shevat approached, I decided to use distance learning to make the content of Tu B’Shevat more imminent for my students.

As part of my six-week Tikkun Olam course, I introduced the holiday of Tu B’shevat as a conduit to the value of Tikkun Olam as seen through Israeli agriculture and the observance of ancient laws that have been reinstituted in the modern State of Israel after centuries of disuse.

We started out by looking at the sharing of resources through the law of Maaser (tithing): “Every year, you shall set aside a tenth part of the yield, so that you may learn to revere your God forever.”

I posted the text on the online bulletin board as a way of introducing the connection between Tu B’shevat and Tikkun Olam. The students were asked to relate to different questions that the concept of ma’aser (tithing) brings up.

• Is ma’aser a concept that is still applicable in today’s world?
• Was it easier for people in the “olden days” to give ma’aser than it is today? Why?
• Do you know anyone who gives ma’aser? Can you tell us a little about the person and which causes s/he gives to?

These questions were posted on a linoboard and students clicked on “sticky notes” to drag the note to the question and answer, based on their knowledge, experiences and feelings.

We introduced the question of “why is giving ma’aser, or any charity, an important Jewish value?” The students watched a video about the importance of charity which served as a jumping off point for them to discuss charity in their lives and in their community.

Then, using a Mindmeister board we created a mindmap of the different types of charities that the students felt that they would want to support. Each student was asked to select a Jewish charity, describe its mission and explain the reasons that s/he thought that it would be an important tzdekka to support.

The half-hour class didn’t provide me with enough time to delve as deeply into the subject as I would have liked. However, the kids thoroughly enjoyed the lesson and, their teacher told me, spoke about it among themselves afterward.

Sitting in my home in Israel (3:00 am my time!), I was able to give the students an experience of the Israel-based aspects of Tu B’Shevat that were lost on me when I was a student. In addition the kids participated on their individual laptops, giving each student the opportunity to chat in questions and answers, post on google docs and online bulletin boards and stay involved and engaged in the entire lesson. In an online learning classroom all of the students stay engaged throughout the lesson. A student can’t zone out while someone else is taking “his turn” because it’s always everyone’s turn.

The students are constantly being asked to comment, respond, think, create and produce which gives no one any time for daydreaming.

Increasingly day schools and afternoon schools are including e-learning techniques in their curriculum as a means of broadening the students’ learning experience, expanding their learning community, and enhancing student engagement. enable the students to engage

The 2014 class begins this week which coincides with Tu B’Shevat. I am looking forward to using my “classroom without borders” to enable my new students to experience Tu B’Shevat in Israel.

Laurie Rappeport lives in Safed, Israel. She teaches about Judaism and Israel for an online education concern and researches American Jewish music traditions, including traditions of the Tu B’Shevat holiday, for the Milken Archives.

George Muresan / Shutterstock.com

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I introduced Green Prophet readers to environmental e-learning and Laurie updated us with details on Mitx, Coursera and Udacity environmentalism courses in Februrary 2013.  A new term has just begun with a wide selection courses related to environmentalism. So this is a good time for a refresher on how Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) work.

I will also provide a list of upcoming courses in green energy, sustainability and other aspects of environmentalism.

MOOC courses are made possible by the Internet. Course lectures are delivered via streaming media, often Youtube or podcasts for off-line viewing, sometimes with embedded examps and quizzes. Electronic textbooks are made available either to read on your computer or via an iPad, Kindle or other ebook reading device. But one of the most interesting aspects of these courses is that they are global.

I’m currently signed up for Pennsylvania State University’s course entitled; Energy, the Environment and Our Future which introduces itself with, “Get Rich and Save the Earth…Or Else! Learn about the past, present, and possible futures of human energy use.”

Its first assignment asks students to tell stories about their experience with energy and submit pictures which explain what energy means to them.

Here is the interesting thing about this and other MOOC courses. It isn’t possible for its instructor, Dr. Richard Alley, or any other instructor to grade the thousands or tens of thousands of assignments which are submitted globally. So some assignments are graded by computers and others are scored with a peer-to-peer ranking system. Engaging and controversial discussions are supposed to rise to the top.

There is also an advantage in scoring, commenting and critiquing other people’s work which encourages people to give each other feedback. I found that this worked reasonably well in University of Illinois’ Introduction to Sustainability course.

Yes, it is possible to game the system by having a group of friends vote for you and take advantage of your timezone, for the most part people taking the course are good and MOOC courses don’t succumb to the academic equivalent of an ecological tragedy of the commons.

The new year brings us many more new courses. I’ll begin with the courses which begin early in January 2014. Some began this week so if you’re interested, sign up so you can catch up on the lectures and homework!

• January 2014 – Global Sustainable Energy: Past, Present and Future from the University of Florida.
  Students will explore energy consumption patterns including individuals, countries and the entire globe. These patterns will include all sectors of the global economy from fully developed countries to developing nations. New energy sources will be investigated and international solutions to future needs will be analyzed.
• January  2014 – Climate Change in Four Dimensions from the University of California at San Diego.
  This course views climate change from a variety of perspectives at the intersection of the natural sciences, technology, and the social sciences and humanities.
• January 13, 2014 – Energy 101 from Georgia Institute of Technology
  As a society and individually, we use energy every moment of our lives to improve our quality of life. Energy 101 will develop the big picture and connect the details of our energy use, technology, infrastructure, impact, and future.
• January 13, 2014: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill offers an even more specialized environmentalism course entitled, Introduction to Environmental Law and Policy
  Environmental law may be the one institution standing between us and planetary exhaustion. It is also an institution that needs to be reconciled with human liberty and economic aspirations. This course considers these issues and provides a tour though existing legal regimes governing pollution, water law, endangered species, toxic substances, environmental impact analyses, and environmental risk.
• January 21, 2014:  The Age of Sustainable Development from Columbia University in New York City.
  The Age of Sustainable Development gives students an understanding of the key challenges and pathways to sustainable development – that is, economic development that is also socially inclusive and environmentally sustainable.
• February 14, 2014: 12.340x: Global Warming Science via edX/MITx OpenCourseware which is unfortunately experiencing technical difficulties at the time of this writing.
• Ongoing: Technology Entertainment Development (Ted) has numerous environmentalism talks available for viewing at any time.

We’re more than a week into the year 2014. Are you ready for a New Year’s resolution to learn more about the environment? If so, MOOC environmentalism courses are ready for you!

Photo of girl with laptop via Shutterstock.

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An unsustainable spike is driving up the cost of higher education, particularly the United States where tuition and fees have risen more than 400 percent since the 1970s, far outstripping both inflation and the housing bubble.  This discourages enrollment in the arts, humanities, environmental science and other subjects with lengthy or immeasurable financial payback.

Instead, students are persuaded into pursuing fad degrees and trade-school certifications and whatever else might pay back that enormous student loan in the shortest term.  Some universities are trending towards monoversities and preventing brilliant minds from reaching their full potential.  Others have fully embraced the financial caste system, turning themselves into exclusive four-year country clubs where learning is an afterthought.

The good news is that this education bubble triggered a renaissance in distance learning.  People from the far corners of the world can go to school together without leaving their culture, family and friends behind.

So who wants to study environmentalism with me?  Here are some of the offerings:

1. Khan Academy is a good starting point.  Bengali-American Salman Khan initially used Yahoo doodle notes to tutor his cousin in mathematics.  He eventually made his lectures public and formed this non-profit organization which includes lectures in diverse topics including ecology and sustainability:

• Thomas Malthus and population growth
• Land Productivity Limiting Human Population
• Energy Inputs for Tilling a Hectare of Land

2. Technology Entertainment Design (TED) talks were organized to spread great ideas around the world.  Many TED talks are on environmental and sustainability topics such as:

• Wolfgang Kessling: How to air-condition outdoor spaces
• William McDonough: Cradle to cradle design
• Garth Lenz: The true cost of oil
• Rob Harmon: How the market can keep streams flowing
• Jane Goodall helps humans and animals live together
• Wade Davis: Dreams from endangered cultures

3. Coursera.org offers a wide range of full courses from multiple accredited US and UK universities including:

•  Introduction to Sustainability an 8 week course beginning Aug 27th 2012.  It will be taught by Dr. Jonathan Tomkin the Associate Director of the School of Earth, Society and Environment and a research Associate Professor in the department of Geology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.  The course textbook is freely available online here: http://www.earth.illinois.edu/sustain/sustainability_text.html
• Energy 101 Will be taught by Dr. Sam Shelton, the founding director of the Strategic Energy Institute at Georgia Tech.  The next course session has not yet been announced.

4. Openlearn is a free offshoot of the UK’s venerable Openuniversity which has an entire course category for Environment, Development and International Studies.  The courses available include:

• An introduction to sustainable energy (T206_2)
• Environment: Treading lightly on the Earth (U116_1)
• Global warming (E500_11)
• Health and environment (SK220_2)
• Earth’s physical resources: petroleum (S278_1)
• Managing coastal environments (U216_1)

5. The University of South Africa also offers degrees in Environmental Sciences.

6. The Nature Conservancy founded ConservationTraining, “an open, online learning resource that provides high-quality educational content on a broad set of conservation issues.”  Their course catalog breaks these courses down into topic areas including climate, conservation management, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Protected Areas and water.

Distance learning is not yet widely available at universities such as Masdar and Tel Aviv University, but as the variety and the number of courses increases and the efficiency of online education improves so will the average level of knowledge about our world.

And that could change everything.

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