InclusiveFuture MOOC
From Screen to Classroom: The InclusiveFuture MOOC and Its First Steps in Portuguese Schools
A free online course developed by Instituto Superior Técnico has become the shared learning backbone of InclusiveFuture in eight countries. In Portugal, it is already changing what happens on Monday morning.
When the InclusiveFuture consortium set out to bring sustainability and inclusion into everyday teaching, it needed something that could travel — across borders, across languages and around crowded school timetables. That something is the project’s MOOC, “InclusiveFuture: a whole-school approach”, developed by Instituto Superior Técnico of the University of Lisbon and now the shared learning backbone of the project’s training in eight countries.
A Course Built for Europe’s Teachers
Launched in January 2026 as the 30th free online course on the MOOC Técnico platform, the course was designed for primary and secondary teachers, school directors and educators at every level. It asks for no previous knowledge, carries no grades, and is available in nine languages — English, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Greek, Turkish, Finnish and Hungarian — so that every partner country could work in its own language while following exactly the same pedagogical path. Enrolment ran from January to July 2026 and drew 323 participants from across Europe, 62 of them in Portugal.
Four Modules, One Whole-School Logic
The course is organised around four topics that move deliberately from theory towards practice.
- The InclusiveFuture Pedagogical Model, which introduces the European GreenComp sustainability competence framework and the pedagogical theories behind it.
- From Learning to Action, which addresses the obstacles teachers actually meet when they take sustainability into the classroom.
- Assessment Approaches and Tools, on inclusive, competence-oriented ways of assessing what students learn.
- Sharing Good Practices, an exchange of inspiring teaching experiences from Europe and beyond.
Rather than treating inclusion as an add-on to the environmental content, the MOOC threads it through all four modules. A green school only means something if it is also a school where every student can take part.
Portugal: From Reus to Quinta do Marquês
The course was never meant to stand alone. In the InclusiveFuture cascade model, educators work through the MOOC alongside face-to-face sessions led by the “Change Agents” trained at the international mobility held in Reus in May 2026.
In Portugal, that cascade reached Quinta do Marquês Secondary School in Oeiras on 8 July 2026, where 28 teachers took part in a local training and a school workshop held on the same day. Prof. Susana Assunção, one of the Change Agents from the Reus mobility, led the training on the GreenComp framework and the Pedagogical Model, guiding her colleagues through the MOOC and the European practices it gathers. Prof. Ana Moura Santos, who coordinates the project for Instituto Superior Técnico, then ran the workshop, turning the methodology into concrete classroom plans and preparing the sustainability laboratories to be held with students.
From Waste to Art
Alongside the work in schools, Técnico opened the project to its own community. Between March and April, collection points on the Alameda and Oeiras campuses gathered plastic bottles, cardboard tubes, caps, corks and sponges, which school groups and families then turned into “Eco-Robot Painters” — small vibrating machines that draw — at a GirlsTeam session in April and at the Técnico Open Day in May. Behind the play lies a serious idea, that circularity and sustainable design are understood best by making something with your own hands.
What Comes Next
With the local trainings now complete across the consortium, InclusiveFuture moves on to school workshops, community laboratories involving students and families, and a three-tier Green School Certification. The MOOC, meanwhile, remains the project’s most portable legacy — a course that any teacher in Europe can open, in their own language, long after the meetings have ended.