A free 8-hour university course on why earthquakes happen
The lesson
Free- Published by
- OpenLearn — The Open University
- Level
- Level 1: Introductory
- Length
- 8 hours
- Format
- Self-paced written course
- Licence
- CC BY-NC-SA (third-party material excepted)
Safety leaflets tell you what to do. This one tells you why the ground moves, which is a different and longer lesson.
Earthquakes is an introductory-level course from OpenLearn, the free-learning arm of the Open University. It is costed at about 8 hours of study and sits at Level 1: Introductory, meaning it assumes no geology background.
What it costs and what you can do with it
Nothing, and rather a lot. You can start reading immediately without registering. Signing up is optional and gets you progress tracking plus a free Statement of Participation at the end.
The material is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence — so a teacher in Assam can legally copy it into a lesson plan, translate it, or hand it out, provided the Open University is credited, it is not sold, and the result carries the same licence. Third-party material embedded in the course keeps its own permissions, so check before reusing images.
Who it suits
Anyone teaching general science at higher secondary level who wants a structured, citable source, and anyone who has lived through a tremor and wants the actual mechanism rather than the leaflet version.
Pair it with the National Center for Seismology’s do’s and don’ts, which covers the practical half.
Source: OpenLearn — Earthquakes ↗ · CC BY-NC-SA (third-party material excepted)
