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Small Changes, Clear Signals: Making Hidden Sustainability Links Visible in Physics
Dr. Martin Braun ~ STEM staff tutor Sustainability is a defining societal challenge and higher education has a role to play in equipping learners to engage competently with its complexity. For some disciplines, this comes naturally. For others, physics among them is less so. An eSTEeM funded project brought together colleagues from across The Open…
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Words of Wisdom: Creating a compendium of Sustainability
Paul Astles and Catriona Matthews ~ Learning Designers You may have read our previous blog post with reflections on our experiences at the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EAUC) conference in Sheffield last year. And if you did, you may remember that at that time we gave an overview of a project called…
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‘Words of Wisdom’: Presenting our project at the EAUC conference 2025
Paul Astles and Catriona Matthews ~ Learning Designers We felt proud (and lucky, given the uncertain financial situation across Higher Education) to be invited to speak at the 2025 Environmental Association of Universities and Colleges (aka EAUC) conference and to represent both the Open University and the Learning Design team for the second year…
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Learning Design and sustainability: Reflections on the 2025 Advance HE Sustainability Symposium
Kathleen Calder SFHEA ~ Senior Learning Designer In March I joined a panel to present our poster ‘Learning design as a catalyst for embedding sustainability’ at the AdvanceHE Sustainability Symposium. The poster describes some of the structured approaches the Learning Design Sustainability Group has taken to support embedding sustainability in curriculum design through connecting with…
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Ed Tech talk up North: reflections on ALTC24
Kathleen Calder and Shawndra Hayes-Budgen ~ Learning Designers This year’s Association for Learning Technologies conference (aka ALTC24) was held over three days in September in Manchester, England. We were invited to share experiences of using Miro to support remote teamworking and to launch the new ALT Digital Sustainability SIG. We’d delivered presentations for ALTC…
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EAUC Conference 2024: Reflecting and connecting with sustainability.
Catriona Matthews and Paul Astles ~ Learning Designers From the 25th to 27th June 2024 we travelled to the University of Winchester for The Alliance for Sustainability Leadership in Education (EAUC) conference and its 20th birthday celebrations. As well as the usual conference fare, we faced moral quandaries in an SDG focused game where we…
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Reflections on ALT conference 2023: Supporting colleagues to take practical actions to embed sustainability
Hayley Johns and Paul Astles ~ Learning Designers This blog post builds on our previous sustainability related post. You can read that here. If you have not had a chance to read it yet, do go back and check it out. The work presented by Hayley and Paul on behalf of the Learning Design Sustainability…
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Sustainability: Our journey to connect colleagues with non-tokenistic action in the design process
James Openshaw and Paul Astles ~ Learning Designers This article is the first of a two-part reflection about our collective experience at the EDEN 2023 conference in Dublin, Ireland and the EAUC conference 2023 in Bath, England. Alongside our shared experience and takeaways from those events this blog post will also include an update about…