1. E-learning for environmental sustainability: driving for change with an open online course
The University of Nottingham has a global community of over 50,000 students and staff located on its campuses in the UK, China and Malaysia or enrolled upon distance learning programmes. It is a big operation, requiring constant staff mobility and offering opportunities for students to complete their degrees across two continents.  At the same time, Nottingham is striving to maintain and further develop its credentials as a leading sustainable university, noting that “the global imperative to reduce carbon emissions and to improve the sustainability of our activities is compelling”[1]. Nottingham was ranked first in the Greenmetric ranking of world universities 2013 [2].
Sarah Speight and Wyn Morgan

2. Combining Agendas
Sustainability and Teaching Enhancement: Community building amongst our globally dispersed population of students and staff; Provision of opportunities for all students to engage in learning for sustainability; Innovative use of online technologies in support of all modes of learning and teaching.
Since 2011, a strategic push to move the university’s sustainability agenda beyond the domain of our estates and operations and into our teaching and learning, has resulted in the development of ‘e-learning for sustainability’ as a core teaching enhancement driver. The conjunction of two initially distinct agendas, sustainability, and teaching enhancement, has emerged from the recognition that a number of development priorities were mutually supportive:
Community building amongst our globally dispersed population of students and staff;
Provision of opportunities for all students to engage in learning for sustainability;
Innovative use of online technologies in support of all modes of learning and teaching.

3. A triple-layered notion of sustainability
Content
topic-focused
Process – multiple-outcomes models, open source
Pedagogy – formative assessment
This paper describes how these development priorities were brought together into a single initiative that proved to be a ‘positive disruption’ within the teaching and learning community. Its focus is upon the iterative development of strategy that has, at its heart, a triple-layered notion of sustainability:
Sustainability as content (topic focused);
Sustainability as pedagogy (assessment, interaction, action-learning);
Sustainability as process (multiple-outcomes modelling, repurposing, provision of exemplars).

4. The ‘positive disruption’ was an online course modelled upon MOOCs (massive open online courses). Repurposing the MOOC for an internal Nottingham agenda, we created an online format (the ‘NOOC’ – Nottingham Open Online Course) within which our students and staff could interact with each other via a shared interest in sustainability. The different perspectives that these stakeholders brought from their campus and home contexts was a major strength, resulting in an intercultural and interdisciplinary course that enabled new partnerships and perspectives on, for and through sustainability. 
Initiative supported by senior managers – who exhibit sustainable behaviours themselves
Supported by research within the sector showing that employers value sustainability graduates and that students make choices in part according to the sustainability credentials of HEIs and employers. (HEA surveys)

5. Modelling Sustainability
Sustainability at Nottingham has been framed by reference to the ‘4C’ model devised by Plymouth University (UK) - curriculum, campus and community within an overarching institutional culture. The ‘4C’ model positions sustainability as a thread running through the entire higher education experience whilst acknowledging the unique context of each university. The idea is that the culture of a university (e.g. a culture of opportunity, of equality, of commitment to positive action and impact) is reflected in how it manages its estates (campus), how it treats its stakeholders (community – students and staff but also neighbours and partners) and what it prioritises within its curriculum and what it sees as the purpose of its curriculum (e.g. to develop students as lifelong learners able to contribute to society, or as a means to high earnings upon graduation). Achieving harmony and balance between the 4C’s is a step towards sustainability.
Our local version has added a 5th C: contribution. Nottingham’s Strategic Plan talks of our commitment to “improve life for individuals and societies worldwide”, “to make a significant global impact” and to be recognised for “signature contributions” that include sustainability [7].

6. Developing a Strategy HEA Green Academy 2011-12
Grand Challenge
OERs
NOOC and NAA
MOOC
UG elective NOOC
Story since – piggy-backing – moving from engagement to resource creation to innovative T & L
9/17/2018

7. Hearing from students
“I’m from Kenya. At the moment the north of our country is facing one of the biggest food crises and starvation. Those are things that are personal to you –you just relate more to it.”
“It is not all about saving money. Especially for those students who come from Yong Nan province, they know very well the pressure of water shortage
I am more interested in the news about sustainability and enjoy communicating with other students from other campus on line.
“I think it’s good to incorporate it into the core modules because then students are forced to learn about sustainability as opposed to having it as an option.
Key word search of module catalogue + focus groups with student leaders on the 3 campuses
Our findings suggested that the e-learning for sustainability strategy at Nottingham should focus upon relevance (of disciplinary methods and topics to sustainability) and cross-cultural learning (engaging students in the exploration of sustainability from the perspective and contexts of their peers). It should develop a format that would appeal to our undergraduates (as the largest group of students but also the group less well-provided for in terms of formal learning for sustainability). It should also harness interdisciplinarity and diversity to explore sustainability from the social, cultural, economic and political dimensions alongside the environmental.
“Teach them how to learn or how to teach as well because if you teach you learn in the process.

8. Learning intentions, outcomes and activities mapped to Salmon’s 5 stages of e-learning
Learning phase
Learning intentions and outcomes
Activities for learning
Access and motivation
Why take the course? Articulate your current understanding of sustainability and how it relates to you
Reflective blogs; opinion polls
Online socialisation
Develop an understanding of different perspectives on sustainability from your peers
Grow understanding of the history of sustainability – the triggers (social, political, environmental)
Discussion of opinion polls, responses to blogs, collaboration to build a visual history with in-built peer feedback for each contribution
Information exchange
Recognise the relationship of sustainability to daily life and be able to review/change daily decisions.
Waste Audit of own domestic waste with results shared with peers
Knowledge construction
Gain understanding of OERs, their use, potential and sustainability.
Collaborative construction of evaluation criteria, individual application of criteria, peer feedback
Knowledge development
Increased understanding of what sustainability means in different contexts through examples, case studies and interactions with students from other cultures and disciplines.
Increased ability to suggest solutions to, and discuss sustainability problems by applying the learning acquired from this module to other contexts.
Discussions of different world views
Critique of selected content
Design of reusable poster that can be used to share, inform, inspire, support.
Using various data sets to design a responsive course that would meet our two guiding frameworks:
the triple-layered definition of sustainability (sustainability as content; sustainability as pedagogy; and sustainability as process).
the 5-C model (curriculum, campus and community, culture, contribution).
interdisciplinary learning model with incentives for student and staff participation that included a completion certificate signed by the Vice Chancellor.
cumulative and developmental approach. Using Salmon’s 5 phases of e-learning as an underlying model, we sequenced our learning outcomes and their associated activities and assignments throughout the 10 weeks of the course. Our reasoning was that building the course as a journey would best support students in moving from fairly simple if engaged conceptualisations of sustainability to a position where they were able to demonstrate critical thinking, ethical judgement, consideration of context or creative/original thinking relevant to sustainability – thus equipping them to have real impact both upon themselves and others. A simplified version of this journey, mapped to Salmon’s 5 stages, is shown in the slide.

9. Quiz the VC live Giving a clear Nottingham flavour
NOOC 1 SWOT Analysis
128 people completed this and there were 1,594 postings in the SWOT analysis discussion forum
Quiz the VC live

10. Driving for change with a positive disruption
Staff responses
I did gain a lot from reading others' perspectives.  I did learn more about what the university is doing. I did identify some more resources from which to enhance my own work. For example, there was an interesting debate about rubbish cultures which has enhanced my understanding of how localism shapes resources use solutions; I've incorporated that into some work I'm doing … I've also adapted some of the debate on how best to wash up in a task for secondary school students.
I have not engaged in depth with forums before, and it was a useful way of having a debate. I hope to encourage my … students next year to engage in debate with each other about some key issues. …. It has been very worthwhile following what's been going on, and I hope it will be repeated next year and subsequently. I hope you'll be able to archive the files including debates, as I'm still mining these resources.

11. Sustainable Innovation
SWOT Analysis
Peer Review
Student-designed evaluation
Reflective Blogs
Waste Audits
Water Footprinting
Posters
Sustainability
SCOOP-IT
DELICIOUS
OERS
TWITTER/
Facebook
The potential for the NOOC to support change in teaching approaches, whatever their medium, is of huge significance for us as it enables bottom-up enhancement that is experience led, as expressed in this feedback from one of the academics who contributed to the course:
“one design principle of NOOCs is to make each action count for as many students as possible. On the basis of this I instituted a departmental policy that all student queries be posted and answered in Moodle discussion fora”.
“my involvement taught me that NOOCs provide an opportunity for a cohort of students to develop a unique set of student-generated learning resources, working together on a learning journey to create something that is owned by the whole group. It also taught me about the diversity of learning styles (‘lurkers’ etc.) and how these can all be accommodated within an online framework”.
The NOOC offered a platform for our global community of students and staff to make contact with each other via a shared interest in sustainability. The different perspectives that participants brought from their campus and home contexts enriched the discussions and activities and enabled us to weave debates around cultural differences and access to technology into our design. We achieved interdisciplinarity. Each week’s learning was supported by recommended readings from the Phase 2 OERs that allowed a topic (e.g. food) to be explored from different disciplinary and cultural perspectives. Students were exposed to learning beyond their degree areas and prompted to explore sustainability from economic, political, cultural and social dimensions in addition to the environmental.
The online format gave us freedom to be creative, flexible and multi-purposed in our assessment and activity design. We used peer feedback and peer assessment, reflective blogs, waste audits, SWOT analysis of university strategy, evaluation of OERs with participant-designed evaluation criteria. Some assessments generated reusable learning objects that we have already used in other iterations of the course.
The NOOC aimed to be reproducible (i.e. sustainable) – we used technologies readily available throughout the University, common social media tools such as Twitter, the blog-collection site Scoop-It, and the bookmarking site Delicious, existing OERs, and activities that could readily be replicated in other online and blended courses. By Christmas 2014, there will be a suite of five Nottingham NOOCs. While their subject matter will be different, they will share their design principles and their strategic objectives – collaborative learning across campuses, cultures and contexts in an innovative format that supports both teaching enhancement and our strategic objectives to produce sustainability literate graduates able to ‘improve life for individuals and societies worldwide’, ‘to make a significant global impact’ and to be recognised for ‘signature contributions’ that include sustainability [7].

12. E-learning for environmental sustainability: driving for change with an open online course
Succeeded in moving the Sustainability agenda beyond the narrowly environmental and into the broader student and staff experience – seen as relevant to all. In so doing, e-learning for sustainability has become an important vehicle for teaching enhancement –
collaborative learning across campuses, cultures and contexts in an innovative format that supports both teaching enhancement and our strategic objectives to produce sustainability literate graduates able to ‘improve life for individuals and societies worldwide’, ‘to make a significant global impact’ and to be recognised for ‘signature contributions’ that include sustainability