Abstract This study focuses on designing a massive open online course (MOOC) to enhance students learning about the energy transition process and its connection to climate change in theory and complex dynamic systems. The course ‘Energy transition and climate change’ covers one of the United Nations’ ‘Sustainable development goals’ and is one of twelve MOOCs that will enable a comprehensive education in system thinking and its applications. It shows how system thinking methods and tools can be applied to tackle current and future energy and climate problems. The goal of the MOOC is to introduce users to the internal dynamics of modern energy systems and energy transition toward CO2-neutral energy systems. The target audience of the course is students who study Environmental Engineering, Energy, Systems, or similar program and anyone else interested in insights into the topic. The course builds on previous energy supply and demand models by updating and adapting them to the existing situation. MOOC is designed by the Competency-Based Education (CBE) approach, and a literature review is used in the study to cover theoretical parts of the course. Technology Readiness Level (TRL) methodology describes the main steps of the course model development progress, and testing of MOOCs pilot version on five students is included in the final stage of the study.