Maastricht University – University College Maastricht

Full course description

The long-run economic development of countries, as well as inequality within countries are the major topics of this course. The long-run growth part deals with topics such as basic growth theories, including institutions, population, education, health, and migration. The inequality part relates to how the distribution of income, access to education, health services, or infrastructure can be highly uneven and become a major obstacle for economic development. Throuhout the course, policy implications and potential actions related to these topics are taken into consideration and discussed.

Course objectives

• To provide participants with an overview of major economic concepts and policies in development issues, such as growth and population dynamics, education, aid, trade and debt. 
• To deliver the skills needed to consider development problems and approach them in a rigorous and critical way, using both economic theories and policy analysis. 

Prerequisites

SSC1027 Principles of Economics. Knowledge of basic quantitative concepts such as reading and working with graphs and simple equations is also a prerequisite. 

This course offers a study of personality and difference from a psychological perspective. This course examines why and when a person behaves in a different way than someone else and how personality impacts what will happen to us in our life. The course also discusses practical applications of theory and research findings and learns to apply measurement techniques for assessing individual differences. The course explores the different theoretical conceptualizations and measurement approaches of personality and intelligence. Based on the purpose of the assessment, different methods may prove more or less useful. The course discovers different explanations for why people differ in their personality and their level of intelligence. The course looks at physiological, evolutionary-genetic, as well as contextual explanations. Further, the course analyzes the relationship between personality, intelligence, and meaningful life events. What personality traits are important for marital satisfaction and what characteristics make us become a criminal? But also, how does becoming a parent or getting a new job change our personality? Lastly the course introduces real life applications of knowledge on personality and intelligence. Specifically, the course discusses how this knowledge is used in clinical settings (e.g., when having patients with a personality disorders) and in organizational settings (e.g., for personnel selection purposes).

This course provides an advanced introduction to the field of human rights by exploring and parsing out disagreement on divisive and polemical issues. The course analyzes how a variety of key issues of legal concern, such as hate speech, social welfare, dignity, the death penalty, and discrimination, are addressed by a variety of domestic and international institutions, such as the European Court of Human Rights, the UN, and the Supreme Court of the United States. This course is predominantly legal in character, social scientific explanation and understanding are not the focus of the course. Rather, the course concentrates on analyzing the justification of legal decisions in accordance with legal rules and principles.

This course demonstrates that psychology is a science that encompasses the collaborative efforts of scientists from many different disciplines. Psychology is the study of behavior and mental processes, and as psychologists, we aim to describe, understand, predict, and sometimes change behavior.  This course considers different approaches to understanding the human mind, the brain, and behavior.  Scientific methods of psychological research are introduced by addressing some of the main questions that drive contemporary psychology: How do we experience fear or happiness? How do we (think we) see the world around us? How do we learn, remember, and forget things? Where should we draw the line between normal and abnormal behavior? How social are humans? When do people harm or help others?

This hybrid course combines the fields of Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Global Public Health to look into infectious diseases that have caused pandemics in the past decades. The topics discussed in Infectious Disease Epidemiology include history, basic epidemiological concepts and terminology, descriptive epidemiology, the epidemiologic triad model, and vaccine efficacy and effectiveness. Global Public Health topics include social and political determinants of health, public health policies, laws and ethics, international cooperation in health emergencies, and also the One Health concept. The hybrid nature of the course is realized through three viruses that have caused major zoonotic/infectious disease outbreaks, which are retroviruses (i.e., HIV/AIDS), influenza viruses (i.e., H5N1, H1N1, H7N9), and coronaviruses (i.e., SARS, MERS, COVID-19). The global impact of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is explored in the third part of the course. Factors affecting antibiotic use, both on macro and micro levels, are discussed and analyzed. The course ends by highlighting the “One Health” concept (i.e., human-animal-environment interfaces) in responding to zoonotic diseases and AMR threats, both now and in the future.