Clare Collins and Uni Newcastle colleagues Tracy Burrows, Rebecca Haslam and Lee Ashton are cooking up a new MOOC

It’s Nutrition communication for health professionals: key concepts via edX, and is about conveying evidence-based “brief nutrition messages” to patients. Diseases specified are type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular complaints.  Starts February

The team’s Nutrition comms … applying skills (also edX) follows in March.

Collins and Burrows also created MOOCS, Food for kids and the multi-run Science of weight loss.

The potential for MOOCs as a low-cost format for health and community-service messages has always impressed CMM (the U Tas Wicking Centre’s dementia MOOCs for example) – and he wonders why the feds do not fund researchers and teachers to create them. Health and Human Services could fund a bunch of MOOCs on specific issues for way less than packaged media messages that suggest change behaviour but don’t explain how to do it.