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The SusTEACH project was a finalist in the Green Gown Awards 2012 following recognition of the contribution of this research and development project to ‘greening’ teaching and learning in higher education systems.

This is the progress to date with developing the SusTEACH toolkit to support institutional transformation at the OU.

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There have been some exciting developments with the SusTEACH project. The data analysis based on the carbon-based environmental assessment of 30 courses or modules in UK Higher Education Institutions is now complete. During the next few weeks we will be holding several workshops at both the OU and Cranfield University to present the results of the SusTEACH project, including several prototype tools which have been designed to help reduce the negative environmental impacts of HE teaching.

The Toolkit includes a number or resources as well as the following tools:

The SusTEACH Planning Tool – is an online tool which helps lecturers and academic designers to rate their teaching delivery plan and produces personalised feedback on the likely environmental impacts associated with this plan.

The SusTEACH Modelling Tool – is an operational tool (Excel based) for lecturers and senior managers which permits the modelling of one or several courses/modules to estimate the energy impacts associated with different HE teaching methods within a qualification programme.

The SusTEACH carbon calculators are available for both students and lecturers to help each calculate energy consumption and carbon impacts associated with their teaching and learning respectively. Energy impacts are presented to both lecturers and students using the measure -per student per 100 study hours (10 CATS credits)

We are interested in promoting the use of the tools in Higher Education to integrate with teaching and learning initiatives, and to support the sustainability agenda.

• to plan the learning design and teaching delivery of modules or courses to reduce environmental impacts associated with Higher Education teaching.

• to have a greater understanding of the environmental impacts of different teaching models.

• to promote awareness of more sustainable teaching and support Higher Education policies to meet the challenges of carbon reduction.

The toolkit will provide a number of interactive tools and resources aimed at supporting HE lecturers’ planning and understanding of the environmental impacts of teaching in HE. This includes the following three interactive tools which aim to support the design of more sustainable teaching practices.

1. The SusTEACH Planning Tool helps to rate proposed new teaching plan and understand the likely environmental impacts.

2. The SusTEACH Modelling Tool helps to model a proposed or actual teaching plan and understand the likely environmental impacts.

3. The SusTEACH carbon calculator helps student/lecturers to calculate the carbon impacts of course/module materials, equipment or resources that are provided to students or that students are expected to purchase/acquire/consume during their studies.

The toolkit will also provide the following three resources aimed at providing user guidance and supporting senior management in HE in conducting an environmental assessment of courses and modules at their Higher Education Institution.

1. The SusTEACH methodology will be offered as a resource for conducting an environmental assessment of courses/ modules including, gathering environmental impact data [on transport; ICT use; printed paper and resources; campus energy consumption, including the VLE infrastructure; student accommodation; and any additional home energy consumption], measuring energy consumption and identifying carbon conversions for monitoring HEI carbon impacts associated with courses/models.

2. The updated carbon conversion factors for calculating the energy consumption and carbon impacts associated with course and module-related will be offered as an additional resource.

3. An overview of online resources available for Higher Education environmental assessment will be provided as an additional resource.

1.  We have conducted a survey with students on OU modules and conducted a pilot study with students at Loughborough University and Cranfield University.  Further surveys have been prepared to invite student participation from Loughborough University, Cranfield University and the University of Oxford over the coming months at an appropriate time in the university calender. This process is ongoing and will be complete by February 2012.

2. The collection of campus data for printed materials and paper, energy consumption (including ICT-related energy consumption), and student VLE activity is in process at The OU.  This data is being gathered to complement the student impact data and this process will be extended to the SusTEACH partner HEI.

3. Three surveys aimed at OU Associate Lecturers, OU Lecturers and Lecturers in partner HEI have been launched and will assess the environmental impacts attributed to working on the presentation and/or production of different modules in HE. 344 Associate Lecturers on the the five selected OU modules were surveyed and we achieved a response rate of 36%. We have also had an excellent response to the survey from all of the senior lecturers who are module or course chairs both in the OU and the partner HEI.

4.  We have developed a dataset of conversions factors for the energy consumption and CO2 emissions associated with travel, use of ICT, paper and print, and heating and lighting.   These will be used throughout our survey analysis as part of the carbon assessment. This supports the preparation of the SusTEACH project methodology for assessing the environmental impacts of HE Teaching Models using ICTs.

5. The analysis of the data has begun, together with preliminary work on the carbon assessment of each of the modules surveyed. We have almost completed the OU analysis of the environmental impacts of 5 OU modules with a first draft written up in December 2011.

6.  The Efficient ICT 2011: Greener Government Event 14 September 2011 held in London was attended . This proved to be an interesting opportunity for finding out about government ICT strategy, particularly with respect to CLoud computing, virtualisation, and the convergence of the green and efficiency agendas.

7.  The’ Sustainability and Enterprise’ event organised by the  Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship (ISBE), being held on 20 September 2011 at The OU will be attended and supported with a poster presentation by Dr Sally Caird about the SusTEACH project and research related to the themes of greening organisational processes, and the development and adoption of Low and Zero Carbon technologies.

8. The project team also attended the Criteria for sustainable E-Learning workshop on 1st November 2011 at the OU, with Professor Andy Lane presenting on Economic Best Practice Criteria.

This data will be complemented by data gathered:

from a questionnaire that is being designed to survey lecturers’ and tutors’ environmental impacts;
from the Estates Departments in the participating HEI, to identify campus site energy consumption and carbon dioxide impacts.

We have drafted a working paper to account for the transformative effect of ICTs on HE teaching and offer a number of related approaches to conceptualising the role of ICTs in teaching models and assessing ICT intensiveness, for the purpose of data collection and analysis of their environmental impacts.

We would favour a classification that encompasses a time-based measure associated with the learning design provision and UK CAT system that also includes a measure of the quality or ‘richness’ of the ICT tools used for learning, as well as the use made of ICTs in teaching delivery. We propose adopting a number of related approaches to conceptualising the role of ICTs in teaching models and assessing ICT intensiveness. The ICT intensiveness of Teaching Models may be assessed by (1) time planned using ICTs on the module (2) richness of ICTs used (3) ICTs used in the planned teaching delivery method. The following steps may be taken to achieve this

1. Identify the CAT points associated with the teaching module.
2. Identify what proportion of the time associated with module CAT points uses ICTs for the learning provision. To aid this process, we can first take the total number of points/hours per module (e.g. 30 pts/300 hours) and split this between the time planned for learning provision by the module designers/leaders, that is Teacher-directed time, Student learning time, and Assessment time. We will focus on the time planned by academic staff although we recognise that students may vary in the time that they allocate for learning.
Recognising that it is not always easy to separate time for teaching from learning, a second aid to this process is to focus on specific learning activities that are designed to meet the learning provision and to estimate the percentage of the ICTs designed on the module to meet this provision. So the objective here is to arrive at an estimate of the percentage of time planned to meet the learning design provision using ICTs (focusing on the learning objectives and the planned learning tasks to aid this process).
3. The richness of ICTs used in Teaching Models may be assessed by identifying the type of ICTs used for the learning design provision, and observing and classifying their characteristics. Identifying ICT-richness in relation to the time planned on modules for using ICTs for the learning provision would give a reasonable indication of how ICT intensive a module is, but it would tell us little about Teaching Models that don’t use ICT’s as part of their teaching delivery. Neither would it tell us much about alternative teaching delivery methods (alternative to using ICTs) that are adopted fully or as a blended approach to delivering teaching.
4. To address this and ensure greater applicability to Teaching Models in HEI we propose examining the ICT intensiveness of teaching delivery methods, both the online and offline teaching delivery methods, including face-to-face, distance-taught using printed text, face-to-face using ICTs, and distance-taught using ICTs offline and online.
The teaching delivery methods adopted on a module may be expressed as a percentage of the time planned for the module. This may be further refined by splitting the planned time associated with the teaching delivery method according to the planned location for the learning provision.
5. By following these steps we can arrive at quantitative and qualitative measures of the role of ICTs on teaching models and a measure of the ICT intensiveness of the planned teaching delivery method (expressed as a percentage of the time planned for the module).

Based on the previous research (Factor 10 Visions project) it is expected that more online distance-taught modules will have smaller carbon impacts. But it is not clear what the impact of blended teaching modules is on energy consumption and carbon emissions. So we hope that the approach detailed here will help us to classify and profile teaching models to represent HEI teaching models which will help to progress aims to assess their environmental impacts, and to develop the SusTEACH environmental appraisal toolkit to support the learning provision designed for new modules.