This course is ideal for students who would like to build their foundational knowledge of the field of psychology. It also provides an introduction for anyone who is interested in the enduring understanding of the field of psychology such as:

Psychology is the scientific study of behavior and mental processes.
Intuition and introspection are helpful to understanding psychology, but often fail us.
The evolution of Psychology as a discipline is one which moves from intuition and introspection towards a more scientific approach.
Different schools of Psychology investigate different aspects of the effects of environment and biology on behavior; there is no one "right" approach.

Click here for Course Learning Objectives.

Course Instructors:

Instructor: Lawrence Welkowitz, Phd.
Learning Designer: Mike Goudzwaard, M.S.
Community Facilitator (MOOC): Katherine Wood

Receiving college credit or a badge for this course:

You have two options for credit in this course. You may either enroll for 4 hours of undergraduate credit through Keene State College or receive a certificate of completion from the instrutor. Both credit and certificate students who achieve a 75% or better are eligible to earn a Course Badge issued through the Mozilla Openbadges.org. For more information including about the credit options, course syllabus, and how your grade is calculated see Course Credit Options.

Acknowledgments:

This course uses the Open Yale Courses videos of Paul Bloom's course as its backbone. We are thankful to both Yale and the Hewlett Foundation for providing these materials free for non-commercial reuse. The majority of the text is provided by Charles Stangor's thorough Introductory Psychology book, issued by Flat World Knowledge and provided by the Saylor Foundation. Both videos and texts are available within Canvas. Thank you to the Center for Engagement Learning, and Teaching at Keene State College and all the many people who helped create this course. See the full list of credits here.

All images are licensed for Creative Commons use unless otherwise credited. See image credits here.