Welcome to our Microcertificate in UN SDG Impact!
With this single purchase, you will be able to take a special selection of microcourses designed to help you hone the competencies you need to effectively engage in the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
This series contains an overview of the UN SDGs prepared by the United Nations Major Group on Children and Youth, important soft skill competencies such as leadership, emotional intelligence and critical thinking, as well as hard skills such as using the Social Lean Canvas, correctly gathering and interpreting data, calculating and measuring social impact, and developing an investor or funder pitch for an SDG project or business idea.
Upon completion, you will be issued a Microcertificate that you can share with peers and colleagues, and post on your social media profiles. If you have any questions about the series, please let us know. Below please find a description of each microcourse included in the series.
Introduction to the UN SDGs
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent a paradigm shift in the world’s development trajectory. It is a radical departure from what has been and seeks to create a more sustainable world for current and future generations. Every individual and organization has the opportunity to transform our world into one that works for people and planet. This course will explore the UN SDGs, the systemic relationship between each of them and how you can make a positive impact by putting your passion into action. It will equip you with an understanding of the fundamental principles behind the 2030 Agenda, as well as complexity in integrating the social, environmental, and economic dimensions. This will allow you to contextualize the SDGs to your local contexts and personal interests, helping you develop concrete problem statements and action for contributing to the implementation, monitoring, follow-up and review of the SDGs until 2030 and beyond.
Leading in Disruptive Times
In a world where exponential and rapid change is everyday news, there is a growing need for a new generation of leaders. Those who want to lead in our more closely-connected world must have a deep understanding of their own strengths, traits, and philosophy (a leader’s authenticity is easily fact-checked online). They must develop themselves into master listeners, able not just to hear their followers, but listen to them in a way that creates buy-in and personal investment while still being able to make decisions and move forward. They must seek partnerships, know how to co-create, and not fear competition. This microcourse will teach you the major components of leadership needed in the world today, guiding you in determining your own leadership journey.
Emotional Intelligence Basics
Emotional Intelligence is defined as a set of competencies demonstrating the ability one has to recognize his or her behaviors, moods, and impulses, and to manage them best according to the situation. This microcourse will give you the tools you need to be emotionally intelligent in your workplace. An employee with high emotional intelligence can manage his or her own impulses, communicate with others effectively, manage change well, solve problems, and use humor to build rapport in tense situations. These employees also have empathy, remain optimistic even in the face of adversity, and are gifted at educating and persuading in a sales situation and resolving customer complaints in a customer service role.
Change Your Thinking; Change the World
This microcourse on innovation and breakthrough thinking covers the topics you wish you formally learned but never did. Starting with self-reflection to understand our own identity and world view, we will create a baseline for how we currently think so our thinking can evolve. To be change agents in our disrupted, rapidly changing, and connected world, we have to learn new strategies to think differently, and understand how our actions impact internal and external systems. This microcourse covers foundational principles, and it is framed with simple questions that bring clarity to thinking processes, and creates a universal language to discuss global change. While our world is in desperate need of solutions to solve grand challenges, all change must first start within ourselves and our local communities. This microcourse will challenge student’s current thinking patterns and problem solving skills to provide a foundation for deeper strategic learning, and leading as a change agent.
Creative Problem Solving Basics
In the past few decades, psychologists and business people alike have discovered that successful problem solvers tend to use the same type of processes to identify and implement the solutions to their problems. This process works for any kind of problem, large or small. This microcourse will give learners an overview of the entire creative problem solving process, as well as key problem solving tools that you can use every day in both your personal and professional lives. We address topics such as understanding problems and the creative problem solving process, identifying types of information to gather and key questions to ask in problem solving, the importance of defining a problem correctly and the use of different problem definition tools.
Innovate the Lean Way
There’s no bigger waste than investing resources working on the wrong thing. Lean start-up methodology, a development approach that requires articulating and testing assumptions, favors rapid experimentation over elaborate planning, relies on audience feedback over intuition, and encourages iterative design, has taken the business world by storm as a way of ensuring that you’re investing in the right thing. This microcourse will teach you to apply this technique in the social innovation sphere, helping you to move from idea to solution and create and test your first prototype.
From Data to Insight to Action
Data is everywhere; it can be found in every part of our personal and professional lives. Because of this, the decisions we make each day that drive our actions can now be informed by data. In this course, you will learn how to make data-informed decisions. This type of decision-making acknowledges that facts and statistics, along with intuition/instinct, are needed to arrive at new insights, which can guide us to the best outcomes. Because the human brain makes decisions in the unconscious emotional part of the brain, and story is the one narrative that impacts this area, relaying these insights through story can spark action. This course covers topics such as: What is the right data to collect? How do we ensure it can be trusted? How do we make sense of the data? What meaning is the data conveying? How do we communicate this meaning through story?
Impact Measurement
How can we measure the social impact of an initiative, an organisation or a company? This microcourse examines how entities can effectively measure and demonstrate the impact of their socially conscious programs for the community, other nonprofits or businesses, and investors. We use practical examples and case studies so you can do the same as you embark on your efforts around the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Pitching for the SDGs
This microcourse aims to provide students with an understanding of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the startup business opportunities they could bring, and how to pitch to investors to fund these business ideas.
Our shopping cart is simple and easy to understand. If you do not have a user account, you will be able to create one upon purchase. Save your username and password as you will need it to login to access course materials later. For more detailed, step-by-step instructions you can review our tutorial How to Purchase a Course. Again, if you experience any issues, please email our Registrar at registrar@ubiquityuniversity.org.
To Receive Certificate:
Upon completion of the microcourses, you will be issued a Microcertificate that you can share with peers and colleagues, and post on your social media profiles. Once you have completed the courses and are ready for us to review and issue the certificate, please notify us using the chat button on the lower left hand corner of the page. We will verify that lessons and quizzes have been completed and will send your certificate to you. The assignments are for your personal use and do not need to be submitted for grading unless you want academic credit for them. Good luck!
Microcourse Contact Information:
Microcourses are completely on-demand for your convenience. If you have questions or require additional assistance, you may click the “Chat” button on the lower, left-hand side of the screen, and submit your question. Our help desk will respond as soon as possible. Please do not email faculty directly with any technology or registration issues.
Single microcourses do not qualify for academic credit. However, enrolled students can add three microcourses together, purchase a Microcourse Credit Conversion option, pay the difference between the cost of the microcourses and a regular trimester course at their degree level and submit your reflection journals and a Final Creative Assignment for grading. If you complete all 9 microcourses in this series, you could earn 3 academic credits if you are enrolled in a degree program. For assistance with this, please email our Registrar at registrar@ubiquityuniversity.org.
