My learning diary for the MOOC “Paths of transformation: sustainability in higher education”

When my friend Robert sent me the link to a MOOC on “Paths of Transformation: Sustainability in Higher Education” (in German only, sorry!) yesterday, I jumped at the opportunity to take it. Here are some reflections.

The course encourages keeping a learning diary, and in this blogpost I share mine. This is an opportunity to experiment with being “a participant”, looking at instruction from the other side. I am sharing my responses to the reflection questions below, and then after that I am responding to more general prompts that they also provided, and to another set of prompts that I have been wanting to try.

Learning diary for the MOOC “Paths of transformation: sustainability in higher education”

What is my understanding of “sustainability in teaching”?

For me, Teaching for Sustainability is teaching for the end of the world as we know it. Discussing whether we understand sustainability as the UN three pillar model of ecologic, social, and economic sustainability, or whether we think about the polycrisis of climate change, biodiversity loss, rapid technological advancement like GenAI without adequate understanding and regulation, geopolitical conflicts, and more — students that start university now will leave it in 2030, when none of the UN SDGs will have been met. Students will live in a reality that is different from anything that we can imagine now, and it is our responsibility to prepare them for that as best as we can. We need to understand that sustainability, no matter how we define it, is emergent. We will never reach “sustainability”, yet we need to continuously work towards it. That requires competencies like systems thinking, values thinking, futures thinking, strategies thinking, and they need to be implemented and integrated. But that also requires a lot of inner development for us and our students. We need to know what we stand for and why, we need to be able to check our own biases and reductionist approaches, we need to talk with people that we don’t initially see common ground with, and seek common ground to have constructive conversations. All of this is hard work, but we need to think big, start small, and act now.

“Knowledge, Skills, Attitudes” — in which of those three do I focus on in my own teaching?

I think we need to work on attitudes first, because then the rest will come. Once people understand that they want to act, they will want to know more, and will want to develop the skills that are needed. Maybe it is not always possible to work on attitudes when there are no knowledge and skills to start from, but in my context, teaching university teachers, I can assume that they have a background on the Agenda 2030, on planetary boundaries, etc., and that they have the skills to work with those topics. But they need to develop agency and self-efficacy, and there I see my job.

How deep do I dive with my teaching? Do I teach with, about, for, or as Sustainable Development?

They present a model where you teach with (touching on topics that are connected), about (teaching relevant topics), for (explicitly addressing and practicing skills like critical thinking etc), or as (actual transformation in cooperation with NGOs, where students become change agents.) Sustainable Development. Which is nice, but there is also a clear hierarchy in the model that the deeper, the better. Which, on the one hand, I agree with, but on the other hand there is also a time and a place, and especially if people work in a context where there is an actual, planned progression in a study program, maybe not the deepest dive is needed at all times. I like the model I wrote about a couple of days ago, where instead the question is whether we are teaching about, with, in, through, for sustainability. Those categories are not mutually exclusive, you can be doing several, or even all, at the same time.

What experiences could I collect with competencies and methods so far? Which have I integrated, what were my experiences? Which would I like to explore more and use?

This is a prompt that I did not do justice. I love using Liberating Structures, and they have always worked great for me, so I am happy to shout out to them. And I am very keen on trying out the photo safari combined with imagining a future for that place that Holmqvist & Millenberg (2024) suggest (in fact, things are underway on that front…). But I cannot be bothered to write more on this prompt right now, I feel like I have done that already repeatedly elsewhere.

Develop a persona representing your students. Then take that persona on a time travel to 2040. Imagine how the world should (!) have changed until then, and how you would teach for that persona. What can you take from this for your current teaching?

Here I might have not written the most constructive first response in the discussion forum, but this is more or less what I wrote (except translated):

I don’t find it helpful to project my assumptions about fictional students, which are of course only based on my current experiences with students, 15 years into the future. The students I will teach in 15 years were babies or toddlers during the pandemic. By the time they reach adulthood, they will have had experiences that we can’t even imagine at this point—the geopolitical situation is unstable, technological development with GenAI is advancing rapidly, and already 6 of 9 planetary boundaries have been crossed. I would not do my students justice if I don’t carefully observe who I’m dealing with at any given time—what matters to them, what experiences they’ve had, what they’re afraid of. Aside from that, I also hope to learn a lot over the next 15 years so that I can do justice to my students in that context. That said, it is important to me to work on having trusting relationships with my students. To create accountable spaces where everyone can learn free from discrimination. To give them the freedom to become the people they want to become, and support them in that. To develop a shared vision of the future and work toward it together. To question fixed frameworks (e.g. who says that in 2040 we will even have “courses”? Maybe we’ll have communities of practice that exchange ideas, discuss, and learn from one another, but the “input” will happen flexibly—while milking cows as a podcast, or in a lounge chair with a book, and maybe the community will meet on shared walks, online, or at demonstrations). I am firmly convinced that the journey is the goal, or that we can only reach the goal if we shape the journey already in the way we dream of the way things will be when we have reached the goal. This said, I am already working on creating equitable learning spaces, anchoring them in place-based learning so that global thinking becomes possible, sharing responsibility with students, and learning together through co-creation.

More general impressions

In their materials about learning diaries, the course creators mention possible prompts (according to Stern, 2010), that I am trying out here, mostly because I want to know what it feels like to work with them:

• This is what I had planned to do… go through the MOOC to check that there isn’t anything transformational in there that I have so far been missing in my own thinking and courses
• How did I like the learning unit? Not too bad as an introduction to the topic, but it stayed very much on a surface level (but then considering that you were supposed to be able to complete it in 5 hours, maybe that’s all anyone could have expected). I really liked some of the small examples (see response to next prompt), but I would have liked to see many more, and also some that go much more into depth and influence a whole course or program rather than being a nice add-on.
• What was interesting for me was…
  • The example with the thumb fight game! Lisa Bohunovsky talks about a small intervention she does, where people play thumb wars. I would probably introduce it by just making the gesture of the game (not saying the name! Do not want to prime them for “fight” or “war” more than necessary), and saying that each round is 20 seconds, and that the goal is to push down one person’s thumb as often as possible. After the first round, point out the winning team. Play again, until a team figures out that cooperation is much more efficient than fighting. If not all the others catch on, maybe let them show what they did in slow motion? Then discuss. This is a really good idea!
  • The reminder, by Lisa Bohunovsky, that Schulz von Thun’s “value square” is a really useful tool! I have used it a lot before, but the reminder that every value as a sibling-value, a positive counterpart, was really useful. For example, in Glessmer et al. (2016) we describe how wanting to support students by providing structures can lead into a vicious circle where students rely on the structure and become even less self-organized (panel A below), but considering how structure needs to be balanced by freedom (panel B) can help exit the vicious curcle. Lisa Bohunovsky talks about how these types of considerations are helpful to practice avoiding binary thinking.

• • What I also enjoyed was a comment by Lars Keller, who stressed the importance of letting people develop the critical approaches that they want to work on themselves — in the same way that he assumes that anyone who is watching this video prefers finding and diving into their own questions instead of responding to those that a teacher poses.
• What I learned… that maybe I am not doing so bad after all.
• What was superfluous for me was… having to post in the discussion forums. I am posting on here anyway, and here I can much more easily link to other ideas, come back to my notes at a later stage, and also it is actually read by other people and I might get feedback or even discussions… I hate posting into a black hole of no return.
• I would have liked to… go into more depth, address questions like justice, equity, inclusion, not mostly ecological sustainability. But then, to be fair, it was also only supposed to be 5 hours of work, I keep reminding me…
• What I should take more time for… breaks. See my last post on slowing down. Was it really a good idea for me to binge this course last night after and on top of a full day of work?
• I need this now… an idea for where this prompt is supposed to be going. I always need coffee?
• Next I will… try a different set of reflection prompts!

Trying Servant-Miklos (2024)’s reflection prompts

Because I am a nerd like that and this is a good opportunity of me being a participant in a regular course, I am also trying the prompts that Servant-Mikols (2024) suggest.

• Describe a learning event that was meaningful to you. What sticks out as most meaningful is reading the other participants’ comments in the discussion forum, and the realization that — unless there is meaningful, formative feedback happening — just asking people to write down their thoughts really isn’t enough (and I realize the same might be said for blogging, which is often also a one-way broadcasting, so if you are reading this: happy for your feedback!). People that take a MOOC which does not offer any credit or reward except for, possibly, a certificate of participation, must WANT to learn how to do better. Yet, if discussions of sustainability in computer sciences end at how much energy is used by different technologies without touching the societal impact of using those technologies, my assumption above that wanting is the path to acquiring knowledge and skills is clearly not valid, or at least not as efficient as I had hoped.
• Analyse your thoughts, actions and emotions triggered by the event and how they relate to your learning goals. I was honestly very frustrated at first. But it is a good wakeup call; too often we design courses where “post something in a discussion forum” is used as short cut to “engage in meaningful discussions with your teachers and peers, or at least write as thoughtfully as if you were expecting them to engage with what you wrote”. So this is clearly not the way to do it. Even though I have plenty to say in response to that example I mention and others, I did not take the time to actually respond and try to engage in dialogue. In a way I feel like I should have, but on the other hand there are only so many hours in a day and I don’t even know if anyone will ever look back into the forum and read my hypothetical response.
• Reflect on what you have learnt and why it is meaningful. It is meaningful for me to be reminded what it is like to be on the “participant side” of things, where you “engage” in discussions to the extent that you have to, to continue to progress in a course. I have great experiences of virtual communities on Twitter and to some degree now also on BlueSky, strangers deeply engaging in discussions, becoming a community of practice with highly valued influence on each other, and co-creation of meaning. On Twitter, discussions were public, and often others joined in, and you could revisit, retweet, pick up old threads. But the conditions in a discussion forum are different; everything is behind a password, you cannot gauge others’ level or other fields of interest to engage by looking back at their posting history, it just feels forced. Also since, at the time of writing this, there was no engagement from teachers even though some of the posts were several weeks old, it did not look like there was going to be feedback or engagement from an “official side”, either. Shows the importance of timely feedback!
• Theorise how the learning fit with your expectations and prior knowledge. Interestingly, this fits very well with my prior knowledge (for example on the importance of timely, formative feedback). But it does not fit with how I (used to) think about scaling up courses. I might well have used a similar discussion forum myself under the assumption that people would engage. But now looking back — why would they?
• Experiment with how you might want to do things differently in the future. What I would do now, based on this experience, is to bring the discussions out in the open. In this case, this would be very easy, since all videos are available on youtube already, to organise something similar to EduChat, which is organized with a hashtag and numbered questions, so even if discussions start out asynchronously (and in the case of EduChat, they try to do a lot of it synchronously, but for a MOOC there are obvious difficulties in that), people can add to it later on. I think the benefits also of enaging people in the conversation that might not have watched the videos, or might have watched one but are not signed up in the MOOC, or didn’t know about the MOOC but then decided they should join, are huge! Discussions can grow way beyond responding to a handful of questions, relationships can form, communities can grow. I think I just convinced myself to do that, and what we’ll do with people who really do not want to write “on the internet”, we’ll figure out later. For example suggest they use a pseudonym…

So this is it for now. I am curious what will happen on February 5th, when the next module opens (which is where, I assume, I can complete the last missing 17% of this MOOC). It is advertised in a way that sounds like there will be advice on where to go next to learn more, so that will be interesting!

G. Servant-Miklos (2024). Pedagogies of collapse. A hopeful education for the end of the world as we know it. Bloomsbury

M.S. Glessmer, C. Seifert, L. Dostal, N. Konchakova und K. Kruse: Providing Opportunities for Individual Practice and Assessment in a Large Undergraduate Mathematics Course. Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium of Engineering Education, pp. 13–20, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15131/shef.data.3507380.v1