Smart cities try to use technology and data to improve the efficiency of city services, to address societal challenges and to improve collaboration between citizens and government. Driving such social change requires a deep socio-ecological transition with both organisations and individual's lifestyles needing to change. This has led to an increasing recognition of the need for education to empower people to play a more active role within smart city initiatives. This paper examines our use of a MOOC as a tool to facilitate attitudinal learning around the topic of smart cities and to explore whether the learners engage in local smart city activities. A mixed methods research design was employed, collecting data via an online survey that was completed by 202 learners and through in-depth interviews with 8 of those learners. The results show that learners’ perceived high levels of attitudinal learning on the topic of smart cities across four categories of learning outcomes (general, cognitive, affective and behavioural). Our findings also contribute to an understanding of the types of post-course activities learners participate in and their experiences of trying to apply what they learnt if they participated in local smart city activities. We conclude by providing new insights into how to design for learning to support social change in the context of a MOOC.

Many Smart City projects are beginning to consider the role of citizens. However, current methods for engaging urban populations in participatory design (PD) activities are somewhat limited. In this article, we describe an approach taken to empower socially disadvantaged citizens, using a variety of both social and technological tools, in a Smart City project. Through analysing the nature of citizens' concerns and proposed solutions, we explore the benefits of our approach, arguing that engaging citizens can uncover hyper-local concerns that provide a foundation for finding solutions to address citizen concerns. By reflecting on our approach, we identify four key challenges to utilising PD at an urban scale; balancing scale with the personal, who has control of the process, who is participating and integrating citizen-led work with local authorities. By addressing these challenges, we will be able to truly engage citizens as collaborators in co-designing their city.