What's The Impact of a MOOC?

Our Animal Behaviour and Welfare MOOC has been running in it's new 'on-demand' format for a little under a week now and a whole new set of students are getting a chance to learn about animal behaviour and welfare, but does that learning actually make a difference?

We were lucky enough today to be visited by one of our MOOC students, Hilda Hermann. Hilda is the Project Coordinator for Outreach KZN, an animal sterilisation and vaccination project in South Africa. In the three and a half years that Hilda has been working with the project, they've sterilised over 27 000 animals.

Many of the staff at Outreach KZN took part in the MOOC and Hilda gave us lots of valuable feedback about what worked in the course, what was difficult, and what people would like to see more of.

But our favourite part was hearing how useful the staff found the MOOC. Working in rural parts of South Africa it can be difficult finding educational resources that fit into busy working lives and schedules, and we think the new on-demand MOOC will be an even greater help in getting the animal welfare message out there at a time and in a format that suits learners.

We also loved this picture of the animal care staff at Outreach KZN with their certificates - it certainly made our week hearing about the impact the course has had!

If you'd like to take the course you can sign up via Coursera by clicking here. You can share your stories about the MOOC in the comments, or on Twitter by tweeting us @JMICAWE or using the #EdAniWelf hashtag. 

New Video: Dog Welfare in Trap-Neuter-Return Programmes

We're very excited to announce the launch of our new video on YouTube, created in partnership with the Dog's Trust.

The Dog's Trust awarded the JMICAWE a grant to investigate dog welfare in Trap-Neuter-Return (TNR) programmes. This method is advocated by animal welfare organisations and the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE). However, with high targets for the TNR programmes in many countries, we need to ensure that we are not putting individual dog welfare at risk in order to achieve population control.

In this video, Heather Bacon, our Veterinary Welfare Education and Outreach manager talks about some of the work we've been doing with the Dog's Trust to understand and measure welfare in a TNR programme.

As Heather says, dog population management is a global issue. A good TNR programme will protect dog populations by improving their health, their relationships with the human community and controlling their population size. But a good TNR programme also needs to consider the use of welfare measures to monitor dog welfare while they are going through the programme.