Principles for enhancing transformative potential of OSE
| Principle 1 | Assess strategic alignment | It is crucial to enhance the synergies of OSE with broader sustainability policies for the effective implementation of HEIs. On the one hand, instructors and program designers need to seek space and value addition by orienting their objectives within HEIs’ overall strategic goals of transformative societal engagement, and authorities need to appreciate that OSE, in turn, can be used to achieve those institutional goals |
| Principle 2 | Ensure resources and collaborations | Implementing online sustainability education at HEIs is heavily dependent on adequate resources (e.g. human, financial and infrastructure), which can be most effectively allocated for the successful design of online education through collaborations among faculty, technical experts, students and relevant societal actors. Such collaborations allow resilience and longevity to initiatives to overcome idiosyncrasies, such as individual leadership or changes in funding, and online sustainability education requires the active development of new relationships between instructional designers, sustainability content and pedagogical experts to ensure outcomes |
| Principle 3 | Promote reflexivity | Thoughtfully structured deliberative processes and critical reflexivity on what kinds of sustainability values programs/courses support play a pivotal role in designing online sustainability education. Together, they enhance the transparency of the normative assumptions that shape and underlie the field of sustainability itself. The need for transparency is particularly heightened in online environments, where content creation involves individuals who are not directly responsible for teaching the program/course and students are embedded in diverse socio-territorial contexts |
| Principle 4 | Develop pedagogies to embed a full suite of competencies | OSE needs to move beyond the transmission of knowledge to encourage action on sustainability problems. This crucial step entails combining both content knowledge and the full suite of sustainability competencies, which requires developing and testing new online pedagogical approaches that facilitate transformative and action-oriented learning and follow-up on the integration and achievement of these competencies in online courses and programs |
| Principle 5 | Anticipate online environments’ strengths/weaknesses | Implementing OSE requires awareness of the risks, while leveraging the potential and acknowledging the limitations of the online format. Ideally, online sustainability education should also include in-person or synchronous interactions to cultivate interpersonal competence. Each of these formats and their combination means that designers and instructors need to be prepared for different learning environments |
| Principle 1 | Assess strategic alignment | It is crucial to enhance the synergies of OSE with broader sustainability policies for the effective implementation of HEIs. On the one hand, instructors and program designers need to seek space and value addition by orienting their objectives within HEIs’ overall strategic goals of transformative societal engagement, and authorities need to appreciate that OSE, in turn, can be used to achieve those institutional goals |
| Principle 2 | Ensure resources and collaborations | Implementing online sustainability education at HEIs is heavily dependent on adequate resources (e.g. human, financial and infrastructure), which can be most effectively allocated for the successful design of online education through collaborations among faculty, technical experts, students and relevant societal actors. Such collaborations allow resilience and longevity to initiatives to overcome idiosyncrasies, such as individual leadership or changes in funding, and online sustainability education requires the active development of new relationships between instructional designers, sustainability content and pedagogical experts to ensure outcomes |
| Principle 3 | Promote reflexivity | Thoughtfully structured deliberative processes and critical reflexivity on what kinds of sustainability values programs/courses support play a pivotal role in designing online sustainability education. Together, they enhance the transparency of the normative assumptions that shape and underlie the field of sustainability itself. The need for transparency is particularly heightened in online environments, where content creation involves individuals who are not directly responsible for teaching the program/course and students are embedded in diverse socio-territorial contexts |
| Principle 4 | Develop pedagogies to embed a full suite of competencies | OSE needs to move beyond the transmission of knowledge to encourage action on sustainability problems. This crucial step entails combining both content knowledge and the full suite of sustainability competencies, which requires developing and testing new online pedagogical approaches that facilitate transformative and action-oriented learning and follow-up on the integration and achievement of these competencies in online courses and programs |
| Principle 5 | Anticipate online environments’ strengths/weaknesses | Implementing OSE requires awareness of the risks, while leveraging the potential and acknowledging the limitations of the online format. Ideally, online sustainability education should also include in-person or synchronous interactions to cultivate interpersonal competence. Each of these formats and their combination means that designers and instructors need to be prepared for different learning environments |
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