Parapsychology Foundation has begun to offer free and fee-based courses and events online. Since 2015, the PF has had a site on the social media teaching platform, WizIQ. The Foundation started this journey by helping to support the Parapsychology and Anomalistic Psychology: Research and Education, a massively open online course offered for free by The AZIRE in January and February of 2015. In 2016, the PF supported the second iteration of this course, Parapsychology: Research and Education, also known as ParaMOOC16 and a third in 2017. The course included more than 20 individual researchers, most of them university-based, from around the world in its first year and more than a dozen in its second year. Over 1200 students matriculated in one or the other of the courses, and viewed the sessions live or in recording, downloaded materials and a core group of students participated in discussion forums not only during the live sessions of the course but also in the once-a-month forums that followed the courses. Organized and moderated by PF Research Fellows Drs. Carlos S. Alvarado and Nancy L. Zingrone, the ParaMOOC series will continue in 2017 with a new iteration starting on January 18th.
As Lisette Coly, President of the Parapsychology Foundation supported and participated in these courses, she began to see what online education could offer the Foundation in terms of expanding and serving its mission to support scientific research into psychic phenomena and advance education in parapsychology. Beginning in May of 2015, Coly organized the first online Parapsychology Foundation Forum to coincide with the visit of Garrett Library Scholars Dr. Chris Roe and Dr. Elizabeth Roxburgh of the University of Northampton and their postgraduate students Callum Cooper, Rachel Evenden and David Saunders.
Around the same time, as a way to make the online sessions of new and old PF events available to the public, the Foundation launched its Parapsychology Foundation YouTube Channel. Since May of 2015 the Foundation has sponsored a PF Lyceum Forum on Physical Mediumship, a two-day conference in which PF International Affiliates from Argentina, Brazil, France, Japan, and the UK covered 50 years of research in each of their countries, two book Expos, one in 2015 and one in April of 2016, bringing in such editors as Etzel Cardeña, John Palmer and David Clavertz-Marcusson, whose Parapsychology: Handbook for the 21st Century received a Book Award from the Parapsychological Association in 2015, and such authors as Dr. Jim Carpenter, whose book First Sight: ESP in Everyday Life, won the same award in 2016.
In the future, the Foundation plans to bring its Perspective Lecture series online, as well as more PF and PFLyceum Forums, and online conferences. In addition, new series are being planned for the YouTube Channel that will join the roll out every Friday of new and old material for the public.
The Parapsychology Foundation maintains a social presence on a variety of social media sites, and the Parapsychology Foundation Facebook page is one of the best places to get information on new events and courses on the WizIQ platform and on YouTube.