Teaching and learning data

Courses Focused on/Including Sustainability

The course inventory is based on course descriptions within the undergraduate and graduate calendars, with a specific emphasis on environmental sustainability. As part of the 2016 report, the Sustainability Office also reached out to department chairs for academic units that offered these identified courses, to verify or modify the course inventory. The definitions provided by AASHE STARS criteria were provided to chairs to determine whether the course content met those criteria, and which are provided below for reference. In the current report, the Registrar’s Office provided a full export of all courses within the 2017/18 academic calendar, including descriptions. The Sustainability Office searched through this list and matched all courses that had previously been validated by department chairs, and added or removed courses as necessary based on changes to the academic calendar.

Cross-listed courses were treated as one total course and were weighted equally across the departments (i.e., 0.5 allocated to Geography & Environmental Management and 0.5 allocated to Earth Sciences for a shared course).

Limitations and Exclusions:

• Course descriptions are not exhaustive, and it is possible that there are many more courses that have units, modules, or case studies related to environmental sustainability that were not included in the description. Further analysis could be conducted by looking at course syllabi.
• Some department chairs did not respond to requests for validation in 2017, in which case the original inventory was used. Approximately 81% of courses were verified. These have been fairly consistent year-over-year.
• Special Topics courses were normally excluded from the count, unless the description provided a list of specific topics that could be related to environmental sustainability. Transfer courses, high school courses, Laurier courses, and any courses that appeared in the calendar but were noted not to be offered until future years, were also excluded.
• The academic calendar lists all courses that are available at the University of Waterloo, but does not indicate whether they were actually scheduled. Further analysis could be done through the Quest system to analyse the number of courses and sections offered.
• Course numbers and descriptions may change year-over-year, which sometimes impacts the ability to see comparative change over time.

Definitions:

STARS defines courses as follows:

Sustainability-focused courses are courses in which the primary and explicit focus is on sustainability and/or on understanding or solving one or more major sustainability challenge.  This includes:

• Foundational courses in which the primary and explicit focus is on sustainability as an integrated concept having social, economic, and environmental dimensions. Obvious examples include Introduction to Sustainability, Sustainable Development, and Sustainability Science, however courses may also count if their course descriptions indicate a primary and explicit focus on sustainability.
• Courses in which the primary and explicit focus is on the application of sustainability within a field. As sustainability is an interdisciplinary topic, such courses generally incorporate insights from multiple disciplines. Obvious examples include Sustainable Agriculture, Architecture for Sustainability, and Sustainable Business, however courses may also count if their course descriptions indicate a primary and explicit focus on sustainability within a field.
• Courses in which the primary focus is on providing skills and/or knowledge directly connected to understanding or solving one or more major sustainability challenges. A course might provide knowledge and understanding of the problem or tools for solving it, for example Climate Change Science, Renewable Energy Policy, Environmental Justice, or Green Chemistry. Such courses do not necessarily cover “sustainability” as a concept, but should address more than one of the three dimensions of sustainability (i.e. social wellbeing, economic prosperity, and environmental health).

Courses that include sustainability refers to courses that are primarily focused on a topic other than sustainability, but incorporate a unit or module on sustainability or a sustainability challenge, includes one or more sustainability-focused activities, or integrates sustainability issues throughout the course. While a foundational course such as chemistry or sociology might provide knowledge that is useful to practitioners of sustainability, it would not be considered to be inclusive of sustainability unless the concept of sustainability or a sustainability challenge is specifically integrated into the course. Likewise, although specific tools or practices such as GIS (Geographical Information Systems) or engineering can be applied towards sustainability, such courses would not count unless they incorporated a unit on sustainability or a sustainability challenge, included a sustainability-focused activity, or incorporated sustainability issues throughout the course.

Courses with SDG Connections:

In 2021, University of Waterloo also ran an assessment of courses connected to the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. The same boundaries and limitations noted above also apply to the SDG inventory. To complete this, the Sustainability Office used the following methodology:

1. Keyword Scan: A list of keywords were drawn from SDSN Global, which included common topics and themes that are associated with each SDG. These were cross-referenced for each course description from the academic calendar, with each keyword recorded as a unique hit.
2. Manual Review: Becuase of the breadth of the keywords and their meanings, as well as the limited information within course descriptions, the Sustainability Office complemented this with a manual review of all courses in the same way that courses were searched above. For each course, all 17 SDGs were evaluated based on reviewer knowledge the major targets (169) and indicators (>240) captured within the broad themes of each SDG. For example, SDG 3 has a very broad theme of "Health", but within the targets and indicators there are a more specific set of health-related topics that provide further focus.
3. Coding: Where there was a keyword hit and the reviewer saw a clear match with the topics under a particular SDG, it was recorded as a "Likely" SDG connection. Where there was a keyword hit but the course description was less clear on the connection to a particular SDG and needed some additional validation, this was flagged as a "potential" SDG connection. Where there was no keyword hit but the course description seemed to indicate a possible SDG connection, this was also included as a "potential" SDG connection. Courses where there were keyword hits but manual review could not determine at least a potential SDG connections were considered false positives and not included.