I enrolled in Denial101x, partly to see what MOOCs are all about and partly to see what Cook and co were up to now.

Production values are high. The videos are slick, and well-integrated with surveys, discussion forums and quizzes to test how well you understood the material.

The contents are poor. The title is a start. "Denial" is a deliberate provocation, used to reinforce the tribal identities that polarize the climate debate.

The opening survey was full of leading questions, and the accompanying quizzes are not much better. As an example, students are asked to pass judgement on parents who choose against vaccination. Little information is giving about the situation. Parents may opt out of vaccination because they are confused about its pros and cons, or because vaccination conflicts with their religious beliefs, or because they have superior knowledge of their child's medical condition. Who knows? However, students of this course are led to believe that anti-vaxxers are like Holocaust deniers.

As another example, students are asked to judge the size of the urban heat island effect, again without providing much context. The world has warmed by some 0.8K on average since the start of the industrial revolution. Cities are 2-4K warmer than the surrounding countryside. Is that large or small? Cities occupy only a tiny fraction of the planet's surface, so if area is your frame of reference, the urban heat island effect is not that important. On the other hand, more than half of all people live in cities, so if population is your frame of reference, the urban heat island effect is a lot bigger than greenhouse warming. And, as thermometers tend to be where people are, the urban heat island effect is quite an important factor when homogenizing temperature records. Such nuances, so common in a university education, are absent in Denial101x.

I guess this comes as no surprise as the team behind Denial101x is the team behind SkepticalScience, that is, a bunch of none-too-bright rabid environmentalists.

It is a surprise, at least to me, that the University of Queensland and edX lend their name to this. I inquired with edX, and they confirm that quality control is not their thing. Indeed, they are not even bothered when lecturers seem unsure about their qualifications and employers. The course leader does not have a PhD, and in the first two weeks we saw a climatologist lecture in psychology and a chemist lecture in climatology. A bad advertisement for MOOCs.

As an aside, after my course on Climate Economics, one of the students asked me where I stood on the politics of it all.