The Parapsychology Research and Education free online course is now open for enrollment. The schedule has been restructured and the course now has a specific topic, “Survival of Death and Parapsychology.” Enrollment for the course opened on March 21st and will close on May 31st. To enroll click here and to see a quick tutorial about enrolling click here (the academy on the social media teaching platform, WizIQ, has changed somewhat this year). The first live session will be held on Saturday April 6th and the last live session will be held on Sunday May 19th. All live sessions will take place on Saturdays and Sundays, including the discussion forums, with most of them scheduled for noon Eastern.
As usual, folks who enroll in the course will have access to the course materials and the recordings of the live sessions at least until April of 2020. All of the substantive lectures will be published to the Parapsychology Foundation’s YouTube channel (barring technical difficulties that preclude that), and will roll out over the next couple of years, along with the remnant of lectures from the previous years.
Begun in 2015 by Carlos and I, the ParaMOOC enrolled over 1000 people in its first year, and the effort was supported by a number of donors including the Parapsychology Foundation, Natasha and Jonathan Chisdes of Chizfilm.com as well as Dr. Phil Morse who is one of this year’s speakers. From 2016 through this year, with over 300 individuals enrolling each year (well so far I think we have around 48, so plenty of room in the course, folks!), the Parapsychology Foundation took over all of the funding, enabling Carlos and I to continue to manage a large course with many speakers per week, and a great deal of work both during the course and after with the most active participants. As we and the Parapsychology Foundation faced a downturn in the economic feasibility of such a big endeavor this year, Carlos and I began to think about not only the content, but the scope. After four years of casting a wide net over the areas of study the field ecompasses, we began to think that a thematic MOOC was in order, hence the focus on survival.
In ParaMOOC 2017, we opened a few of the live sessions to anybody who wanted to attend, and because that was appreciated by the attendees, the speakers and their network of colleagues and friends, we decided to open all of the live sessions to the public in 2018. We’ll be continuing that policy this year. Only enrollees are eligible for certificates, however.
As for the faculty members, from the beginning of the ParaMOOC series, Alvarado, who has always taken the lead on faculty recruitment, wanted to make sure that speakers were almost always active researchers or theorists or others engaged in some important activity for the promotion of serious parapsychological research. The vast majority of past and present speakers hold doctoral degrees in their areas, or on occasion, have been physicians who also conducted research, or post-graduate students. And we have also included a couple of extraordinary individuals without advanced degrees who have a clear reputation for engaging in high level research. Our hope was to provide attendees with the opportunity to interact with the faculty, raising questions and making comments, and to provide the faculty with the opportunity to craft a lecture or lectures of a length that was unavailable to them at the conferences and other academic and scientific events. To be honest, we’ve been very lucky to have had so many excellent speakers agree to speak and some, more than once!
Over the past four years the faculty of the ParaMOOC series has included many of the most important and active individuals in the field, past and present, among them Dr Richard Broughton (Retired, University of Northampton), Dr Dick Bierman (University of Amsterdam), Dr Dean Radin (Senior Scientist, Institute for Noetic Sciences), Dr Stephen Braude (Retired, University of Maryland-Baltimore County), Dr Roger Nelson (Global Consciousness Project), Dr Renaud Evrard (Lyon University), Dr Patrizio Tressoldi (University of Padova), Dr Wellington Zangari (University of São Paulo), Dr Alexander Moreira-Almeido (Federal University of Juiz de Fora), and Dr. Alejandro Parra (the Open Interamerican University of Buenos Aires). Three of these mentioned above will be back with us again this year.
The following are the ParaMOOC2019 faculty and their specific topics:
Dr Carlos S Alvarado, the co-director of The AZIRE, an online project of Alvarado, Zingrone & Associates, and a Research Fellow at the Parapsychology Foundation (USA). Dr Alvarado will present “Survival of Death and the Development of Parapsychology” on Sunday, April the 7th, and “European Interest in Survival of Death: The Case of Ernesto Bozzano” on Saturday, April 13th.
Dr Janice Miner Holden, editor of the Journal of Near Death Studies, and Professor of Counseling Education at the University of North Texas (USA), will present “Near-Death Experiences and the Survival of Physical Death” on Sunday, April 14th.
Dr Phil Morse, retired Professor Emeritus of Education at the State University of New York at Fredonia (USA), will present “The Amazing, Unimpeachable Mediumship of Leonora Piper,” on Saturday, April 20th.
Dr Masayuki Ohkado, Professor in the Graduate School of Global Humanics and Faculty of General Education of Chubu University (Japan), will present “How Real are Past Life Experiences under Hypnosis?”, on Saturday, April 27th.
Dr Alejandro Parra, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Psychology of the Universidad Abierta Interamericana (Argentina), will present “Unusual perceptual experiences in hospital settings and anomalous experiences in nurses” on Sunday, April 28th.
Dr Julie Beischel, co-founder and director of Windbridge Research Center (USA), will present “The Four Types of After-Death Communication Experiences (ADCs),” on Saturday, May 4th.
Dr Callum E. Cooper, Instructor in Psychology at the University of Northhampton (UK) will present “Apparitions and Other Experiences of the Bereaved,” on Sunday, May 5th.
Dr Alexander Moreira-Almeida, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Federal University of Juiz de Fora (Brazil), will present “Mind-Body Independence and Survival of Death,” on Saturday, May 11th.
Dr Michael Nahm, researcher at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health (Germany), will present “Terminal Lucidity,” on Sunday, May 12th.
Dr Stephen E. Braude, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, will present “Post-mortem Survival: The Central Issues” on Saturday, May 18th.
And as always, additional materials, links to previously recorded lectures and YouTube videos, and tutorials will be included in the course. To embed the Google calendar for the course into your own calendar, click here.
We hope you’ll join us again this year. And keep an eye on the ParaMOOC playlist on the Parapsychology Foundation’s YouTube Channel as we’re going to continue to upload past presentations as we can.