Can Wellbeing Make Everyone More Focused and Effective? - A Free Course

Since the financial crisis, there has been an increased interest in moving away from GDP and wealth as measures of national and individual performance. Instead, more explicit attention is being paid to wellbeing around the world, and how we can promote it at the individual, local, national and international levels.

The free online course “Social Wellbeing” will help you engage constructively in the wellbeing movement, and use wellbeing considerations to make important transformations to your work and your ways of planning, learning and justifying your decisions.

Social Wellbeing Course Content

The course aims to create a global community of wellbeing practitioners, who can inspire and learn from each other, including:

Human resources (HR) professionals, who are keen to embrace wellbeing and purpose, to improve staff satisfaction and productivity;
Social planners from the public and third sector, who want to address the social and economic factors that affect wellbeing at a community level;
Policy makers and civil servants, who wish to measure wellbeing or understand the life outcomes that matter most to people when developing policy.

The course includes the following topics:

Looking at the world through a wellbeing lens;
Could your work, and your organization, become more effective by making wellbeing a core theme?
What does it mean, in practice, to use a wellbeing lens?
Can we usefully highlight in our organizational aims and performance targets?
The factors that contribute to wellbeing at different levels:
- Personal and interpersonal: what are the main ways of thinking about wellbeing as a whole? What are the key domains and components of personal wellbeing?
- Organisational and community: how do communities and organizations facilitate wellbeing? What is community vitality? What is a healthy organizational climate?
- National and international: What is national wellbeing and how can we measure and promote it?

Summary of Main Course Features

Educators: Neil Thin, Elke Heins, and Jan Eichhorn
In association with Scotland’s Futures Forum and Scottish Universities Insight Institute
Published by: University of Edinburgh
Starts: 26 September 2016
Duration: 3 weeks x 2 hours per week
Certificates available