Learn how to make healthy choices and adjustments to your lifestyle and environment to help you live a healthier, happier and longer life. Join the EIT Health Campus MOOC ‘Healthy Ageing in 6 Steps. Let your environment do the work’.

Instructor David van Bodegom explains: “Many health complaints, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes or joint problems seem inescapable diseases of old-age, but originate mostly from our lifestyle. A lifestyle that is dictated much in part by our environment. The mismatch between our ‘old’ genes – our evolutionary heritage – and the ‘modern’ environment is the reason that we cannot resist the constant stimuli that seduce us to make unhealthy choices. Do’s and don’ts cannot help us.”

His co-instructor Rudi Westendorp adds: “This health course will take a radically different approach to showing you how to secure a lifestyle, which will keep you healthy as you grow older. We have to let the environment do the work for us. By making small changes at our home, work, school or neighbourhood, healthier choices can become easier or even unconscious.”

Practical assignments will provide you with the skills to re-design your daily environments to promote healthy, longer lives for you and your family, colleagues and neighbours – all the people with whom you share your re-designed environments. You will learn how to create your own healthy living zone. Via the course video’s you will go on virtual excursions to Copenhagen, Denmark and to Ghent, Belgium to watch and learn how the environment can help you live a longer, healthier and happier life!

Course details
Course length: 6 modules
Student work load: 2-3 hours per week
Language: English
Level: Introductory
Price: Free

Course instructors

• David van Bodegom MA MD PhD is trained as a physician and historian, and works as one of the ageing scientists at Leyden Academy. He is also a lecturer at the Leiden University Medical Center and TEDx Utrecht speaker on ‘Nudging Healthy Ageing’.
• Professor Rudi Westendorp, an internationally renowned physician, researcher and currently serves as a Professor of Medicine of Old Age at the Health and Medical Sciences Faculty of the University of Copenhagen. Westendorp wrote the international bestseller Growing Older Without Feeling Old.
• Remon Rooij holds a MSc degree in urban design & planning and real estate & construction management. Remon is experienced in researching and teaching (strategic) spatial planning at TU Delft.
• and many more inspiring guest lecturers.

Course providers
This free course ‘Healthy Ageing in 6 Steps’ is brought to you by EIT Health Campus with EIT Health partners Leyden Academy on Vitality and Ageing, University of Copenhagen and TU Delft.
The course is published on edX, an online learning platform founded by Harvard University and MIT in 2012. EdX is one of the largest MOOC (massive open online course) providers and offers high-quality courses from the world’s best universities and institutions to learners everywhere. In 2016, edX has more than 7 million students taking more than 700 courses online.

Sign up for this free course Healthy Ageing in 6 Steps. Join the course now on edX.