Progress in creating a MOOC on European Territorial Cooperation

Together with its partners, the Strasbourg University, Artois University, Thessaloniki University, MOT, Euro-Institut and the TEIN Network, CESCI is currently developing the first MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) devoted to European Territorial Cooperation (ETC) on behalf of the European Commission. 

Registration will open in February 2022 for the first session scheduled for 7 March 2022. The MOOC will take place over a six-week period. Each lesson will be made up of several complementary sequences containing videos, teaching materials, case studies and interviews with actors. It will be taught in English and those who successfully finish will receive a certificate. 

The online course is divided into four chapters which will provide an exhaustive overview on territorial cooperation in Europe: 

• The first chapter will guide you through the foundations of territorial cooperation by questioning its origins, its evolution and its theoretical framework since its development after the end of the Second World War. 

• A second chapter will depict the existing European policies in the field of territorial cooperation: Interreg, Neighbourhood Policy, Macro-regional strategies, etc., with the goal of analysing decision-making procedures, their implementation, their geographical dimensions and their impact. 

• In the third one, a thematic approach is being proposed. For each of the 5 identified topics (health, spatial planning, environment, culture, mobility), you will be able discover how they have been tackled at the local level, to which cooperation needs they responded and how the different stakeholders intervened and interacted (multi-level-governance). 
• Finally, a fourth chapter will explain how territorial cooperation is concretely implemented by local stakeholders, which difficulties they encounter and which means and tools were activated in order to overcome them.