Helping kids build and manage healthy online relationships

Start: October 2025

Finish: November 2025

Estimated effort: 4h per week (20h total)

Access the course and enroll

For today’s youth, the internet and digital technologies play a crucial role in facilitating and supporting their communication and relationships with their friends, family, peers and others. Many children and young people use technology as a way to develop new friendships and relationships, as well as manage and strengthen existing relationships with those they know offline. Youth online communication can take many forms, and young people use a range of services and platforms to meet their needs for developing relationships. However, with the limitless opportunities for connection and communication with others, there are also many risks ranging from cyberbullying, or grooming to radicalisation of youth or harmful gender stereotypes, among others.

Against this background, this MOOC will address some of the most prominent risks and challenges that arise from the online interactions and relationships of youth. The course will provide participants with opportunities to explore and understand the nature of youth online relationships (including but not limited to those that are considered to be romantic), the features of healthy relationships, what constitutes positive and safe behaviour online and how educators can empower youth to build healthy relationships and positive online communities.

You can follow the course at your own pace. We will open one module at the beginning of each week, and there is only one deadline for the peer-review activity that you need to take into account.

Learning objectives

To understand the ways in which youth communicate online and through technology.
To understand the benefits that online communication offers to young people as well as the most prominent risks and challenges that arise from the online interactions and relationships.
To explore the strategies that youth can employ to manage these risks and the educational approaches to teaching these strategies.
To identify skills required to develop and maintain healthy relationships between individuals and groups, with a focus on how educators can empower and support their learners to become active and positive digital citizens.
To raise awareness of the BIK+ strategy and Insafe network, as part of the network of Safer Internet Centres (SICs) in Europe, and associated resources.

Modules

Module 1: Online communication
Module 2: Understanding healthy relationships
Module 3: Tackling unhealthy and harmful relationships
Module 4: Empowering positive online behaviour

Prerequisites

The course will target primary and secondary school teachers of any subject, particularly those who provide pastoral support or education (ethics) to learners. It will also benefit other educational professionals and stakeholders, such as heads of schools, school support staff, professionals working in non-formal education settings, and policymakers interested in this topic.

Certification

In order to earn the certificate, participants must successfully complete the course content, create a lesson plan that incorporates ideas from the course, and review at least three of their peers’ lesson plans.

The final deadline to complete all activities is 12 November 2025, 23:59 CET.

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