For 25-year-old Drew Rooke, school education on Indigenous Australia left him wanting.

"I have pursued learning about the Indigenous culture of Australia by my own means, but as a result of the education system in Australia my knowledge was limited," he said.

"I think it's important as a young white Australian to firstly acknowledge the real history of the Sydney area and wider Australia, as well but to not only acknowledge it but also learn about that history."

So Mr Rooke enrolled in a massive open online course (MOOC) run by the University of Sydney called Cultural Competency: Aboriginal Sydney.

Dr Gabrielle Russell-Mundine from the National Centre for Cultural Competency developed the MOOC's content, made up of six modules from learning the importance of a welcome to country, to sovereignty, languages and artefacts.

"The main aim of the MOOC was to highlight the often invisibility of Aboriginal narratives and experiences of Sydney," she said.

"We really wanted to bring to light a different perspective."

But because the course is all online, anyone can enrol anywhere in the world.

The course has been running for a month, and 516 people have enrolled, with 60 per cent from Australia and the rest from the US, UK and elsewhere.

From Redfern to the world

The creators of the MOOC wanted to use Sydney as an example for people to draw upon when looking at their city or region and asking questions about its Indigenous history.

"[The course aims to] highlight some ways of looking at the environment around you and the people around you and then reflect and bring it back to your own context," Dr Russell-Mundine said.

"Who are the first peoples of your place? Where are the stories that are not being told? What are the dominant narratives that have excluded other narratives?"

Professor Juanita Sherwood from the National Centre for Cultural Competency says the Sydney suburb of Redfern will serve as a starting point for the course.

"I have an Indigenous background. I've been connected to the community for many years and Redfern is the black centre of Australia everyone knows about Redfern," she said.

"We thought Redfern was really important to reflect the importance of Redfern to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history."

Professor Sherwood believes a lack of understanding around Indigenous culture is a problem in Australia.

"I've worked in this area for 35 years and I have to say it's very poor, and it's because people haven't been given opportunities to learn in this space."

The MOOC comes at an important time, as attitudes to racism need to improve, according to Victoria Grieves, an Indigenous research fellow at Sydney University.

"One of the things that concerns me is that after all these decades of educating non-Aboriginal people about us, we're actually in more of a perilous position than we've ever been in," she said.

"With Government initiatives like the Northern Territory intervention that's affected the whole of Aboriginal Australia, and the threatened closure of Aboriginal communities in remote Australia and so on.

"Some of us are starting to question whether education is the thing that is going to change racist attitudes."