Embedding sustainability through systems thinking in practice: some experiences from the Open University

One initiative that has emerged during the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) through the work of the Open University Systems group has been its postgraduate programme in Systems Thinking and Practice (STiP). Built on some forty years’ experience of systems teaching and research at the Open University (OU), this open learning, distance taught programme is designed to develop students’ abilities to tackle complex messy situations, to provide skills to think more holistically and to work more collaboratively to avoid systemic failures. This paper critically reviews the trajectory of this programme –its past, present and future. It discusses the STiP programme’s many boundaries with other programmes and across sectors. Challenges of epistemology, ethics and purpose are explored, in relation to education for sustainability. The programme’s many and varied teaching and learning processes are explicated. The pedagogy of the STiP programme is grounded in a diverse range of students’ experiences and needs that by no means all focus explicitly, or primarily, on sustainability or sustainable development. Many OU students study part-time alongside their other commitments, both work and community-based. STiP students are all interested in systems and learning. But what STiP is a part of for them varies considerably. Students come mainly from the UK and rest of Europe. Many of their interactions are online through several different fora. A diverse, active and critical OU STiP alumni community has developed, initiated by the early graduates of the programme. Academics responsible for the programme also participate in this community’s deliberations, at the invitation of student alumni. In this paper, the authors build on their various experiences of the STiP programme and re-explore its contexts and boundaries from an ESD point of view. They use some of the systems heuristics that they teach, to critically reflect on both what is being achieved through this programme in relation to education for sustainability and what they and some of their past students and associate lecturers think ought to be occurring in this respect as they go forward

Collaborative Development of Open Educational Resources for Open and Distance Learning

Open and distance learning (ODL) is mostly characterised by the up front development of self study educational resources that have to be paid for over time through use with larger student cohorts (typically in the hundreds per annum) than for conventional face to face classes. This different level of up front investment in educational resources, and increasing pressures to utilise more expensive formats such as rich media, means that collaborative development is necessary to firstly make use of diverse professional skills and secondly to defray these costs across institutions. The Open University (OU) has over 40 years of experience of using multi professional course teams to develop courses; of working with a wide range of other institutions to develop educational resources; and of licensing use of its educational resources to other HEIs. Many of these arrangements require formal contracts to work properly and clearly identify IPR and partner responsibilities. With the emergence of open educational resources (OER) through the use of open licences, the OU and other institutions has now been able to experiment with new ways of collaborating on the development of educational resources that are not so dependent on tight legal contracts because each partner is effectively granting rights to the others to use the educational resources they supply through the open licensing (Lane, 2011; Van Dorp and Lane, 2011). This set of case studies examines the many different collaborative models used for developing and using educational resources and explain how open licensing is making it easier to share the effort involved in developing educational resources between institutions as well as how it may enable new institutions to be able to start up open and distance learning programmes more easily and at less initial cost. Thus it looks at three initiatives involving people from the OU (namely TESSA, LECH-e, openED2.0) and contrasts these with the Peer-2-Peer University and the OER University as exemplars of how OER may change some of the fundamental features of open and distance learning in a Web 2.0 world. It concludes that while there may be multiple reasons and models for collaborating on the development of educational resources the very openness provided by the open licensing aligns both with general academic values and practice but also with well established principles of open innovation in businesses

The learning network on sustainability: An e-mechanism for the development and diffusion of teaching materials and tools on design for sustainability in an open-source and copy left ethos

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be obtained from the link below - Copyright @ 2011 InderscienceThis paper presents the intermediate results of the Learning Network on Sustainability (LeNS) project, Asian-European multi-polar network for curricula development on Design for Sustainability. LeNS is a mechanism to develop and diffuse system design for sustainability in design schools with a transcultural perspective. The main output of the project is the Open Learning E-Package (OLEP), an open web-platform that allows a decentralised and collaborative production and fruition of knowledge. Apart from the contents, the same LeNS web-platform is realised in an open-source and copy left ethos, allowing its download and reconfiguration in relation to specific needs, interests and geographical representation

Enhancing online climate change education: distance and conventional university collaboration for a Master's curriculum

See also a longer version: ‘Expanding Citizen and Practitioner Engagement with the Climate Change Challenge Through Collaborative Masters Curriculum, Open Educational Resources, E-learning Communities and Virtual Mobility’, presented at a conference of European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EDTU), Zermatt, Switzerland, September 2010 (www.eadtu.nl/.../Accepted%20Presentations%20for%20Newsletter.pd).This paper analyses the different ways in which both distance and conventional universities engage with learning and teaching. It argues that rather than seeing their roles as institutionally compartmentalised, there is much benefit in delivering online education through an institutional collaboration which develops synergies with a potential to contribute to citizen and professional practitioner empowerment, in this case, for debates about climate change. The example the paper draws on is that of a European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students (Erasmus) project ‘The Lived experience of climate change (LECH-e): interdisciplinary e-module development and virtual mobility’. The project brings together five distance and three conventional universities across six EU countries, plus the European Association of Distance Teaching Universities (EADTU), to create a Master’s curriculum in the area of climate change. It argues that universities across Europe have complementary strengths, both in terms of their disciplinary expertise and the ways in which they engage with students. Understanding the complex, real-world challenge of climate change requires a holistic approach which draws on these complementary strengths through collaborative work. Keywords: conventional universities; distance-learning universities; Master’s curriculum in climate change; collaboration

Systems practice at the United Kingdom's Open University

This chapter relates the emerging focus on systems practice within the Systems Discipline at the Open University. Recent innovations have occurred in the changing environment of the University (Lane 1999), the higher education sector (Ison 1999) and the systems community more generally (Maiteny and Ison 2000)

Educating the educators: Incorporating bioinformatics into biological science education in Malaysia

Bioinformatics can be defined as a fusion of computational and biological sciences. The urgency to process and analyse the deluge of data created by proteomics and genomics studies has caused bioinformatics to gain prominence and importance. However, its multidisciplinary nature has created a unique demand for specialist trained in both biology and computing. In this review, we described the components that constitute the bioinformatics field and distinctive education criteria that are required to produce individuals with bioinformatics training. This paper will also provide an introduction and overview of bioinformatics in Malaysia. The existing bioinformatics scenario in Malaysia was surveyed to gauge its advancement and to plan for future bioinformatics education strategies. For comparison, we surveyed methods and strategies used in education by other countries so that lessons can be learnt to further improve the implementation of bioinformatics in Malaysia. It is believed that accurate and sufficient steerage from the academia and industry will enable Malaysia to produce quality bioinformaticians in the future

Inclusion of an Introduction to Infrastructure Course in a Civil and Environmental Engineering Curriculum

Civil infrastructure refers to the built environment (sometimes referred to as public works) and consists of roads, bridges, buildings, dams, levees, drinking water treatment facilities, wastewater treatment facilities, power generation and transmission facilities, communications, solid waste facilities, hazardous waste facilities, and other sectors. Although there is a need to train engineers who have a holistic view of infrastructure, there is evidence that civil and environmental engineering (CEE) programs have not fully addressed this increasingly recognized need. One effective approach to address this educational gap is to incorporate a course related to infrastructure into the curriculum for first-year or second-year civil and environmental engineering students. Therefore, this study assesses the current status of teaching such courses in the United States and identifies the incentives for, and the barriers against, incorporating an introduction to infrastructure course into schools’ current CEE curricula. Two distinct activities enabled these objectives. First, a questionnaire was distributed to CEE programs across the United States, to which 33 responses were received. The results indicated that although the majority of participants believe that offering such a course will benefit students by increasing the breadth of the curriculum and by providing a holistic view of CEE, barriers such as the maximum allowable credits for graduation, the lack of motivation within a department—either because such a course did not have a champion or because the department had no plans to revise their curriculum—and a lack of expertise among faculty members inhibited inclusion of the course in curricula. Second, three case studies demonstrating successful inclusion of an introduction to infrastructure course into the CEE curriculum were evaluated. Cases were collected from Marquette University, University of Wisconsin-Platteville, and West Point CEE programs, and it was found that the key to success in including such a course is a motivated team of faculty members who are committed to educating students about different aspects of infrastructure. The results of the study can be used as a road map to help universities successfully incorporate an introduction to infrastructure course in their CEE programs