Digital Learning for Sustainability
There's a growing need to talk about the various environmental and social pressures that
today's world is facing.
Many companies, educational institutions and organisations are
considering these issues amongst their top priorities and make efforts to equip their employees and/or learners with the necessary skills and mindset.
This not only means talking about problems to solve, but learning about:
lowering energy use,
ways to reduce expenses,
being ready to enter the future job market,
developing products that can be reused,
optimising processes, and
having a better understanding of society and nature around us in general.
These are just some of the possible topics that can be discussed at organisations.
Let's dive into some of the subject areas to learn more about the ways we can utilise digital learning in addressing global issues.
Do you want to see other connections between digital learning and sustainability?
Check out our new page here.
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)
ESG stands for Environmental, Social, and Governance, representing a set of criteria used to evaluate a company's or organisation's impact on these three crucial factors. ESG criteria are increasingly used by investors, businesses, and stakeholders to gauge the sustainability and ethical practices of an entity, promoting responsible and conscientious business behaviour.
ESG online training programmes cover a wide range of topics and sustainability related matters. The abbreviated concepts aim to offer everyone a set of principles and frameworks for understanding the most burning pressures of today's world. The courses also help the learners to familiarise themselves with the current environmental goals and regulations, the various ways they can contribute to overcoming social problems and the methods their companies' operations can be improved for a more sustainable future.
As there's a wide range of possible topics covered in these programmes, there's a good amount of flexibility in terms of focus points and learning objectives. However, ESG courses also come with a number of "fixed" must-knows such as the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations) or some of the most often used regulatory frameworks.
Instructional design tips and tricks: In order to bring the content closer to the learners, it can be a great idea to demonstrate specific points through real-life examples. These case studies can help the learners to feel more inspired to promote sustainable practices within their own organisation. Through these examples, the learners can also see the steps that an organisation need to take if they want to contribute to a greener world.
Emissions
Moving on from the broader ESG topics to something more specific, online courses related to emissions are also quite popular and impactful. These courses help companies to re-evaluate their operation and production strategies and have a clearer picture of the impact of their activities in terms of direct and indirect emissions.
These digital learning experiences often start by defining some key terms related to greenhouse gases and global warming effect followed by introducing some of the most important reporting standards and "boundaries". Depending on the length and aims of the course, there's a chance to discuss data collection methods and equipment inventory management to gauge and track how much the equipment used by the company emits.
Instructional design tips and tricks: Since there's a lot of numbers related to the topic, you can always use these to create cool interactive tasks in Storyline. For example, a task where they need to calculate the emissions based on some data and the method that was discussed earlier in the module. You can also utilise scenario-based activities, the learners are given a situation and they need to decide which scope (1,2,3 above) the activity belongs to and how they would respond to the situation.
Green skills and jobs
With a slightly different target audience, greens skills and jobs related courses are designed to help learners make career decisions and be better prepared to tackle the
challenges ahead of them. These modules often rely on recent statistics and projections about emerging industries.
Courses focusing on green skills and jobs also discuss the various cognitive, inter- and intrapersonal skills which can be extremely useful for learners to focus their attention to specific areas rather than feeling overwhelmed by the amount of options available.
The courses are highly customisable depending on the target audience's needs. For example, they can be area specific (UK, US, Europe / country or region), job type specific - energy sector, transport, construction - or it can be tailored to target certain skills or skill development methodologies.
Instructional design tips and tricks: There are plenty of opportunities here to be creative about making the course interactive. The learners can practice CV writing and we can even utilise some kind of peer feedback learning design, so that the experience becomes multi-layered. We can also utilise the latest AI developments for a cover letter writing task where the learners would get some immediate feedback and be able to further improve their approach.
Conclusion
The need for sustainable solutions is all around us and it's great to see that there's a growing interest in the field too. From a learning experience design point of view, these topics are extremely thankful because they provide a huge number of opportunities to bring in relevant information and to create exciting activities.
If you would like to learn more about the benefits of using digital learning for creating courses about sustainability, visit this new page on our website.
Scope 1,2,3 image source: https://www.compareyourfootprint.com/difference-scope-1-2-3-emissions/
Comments