| Overall Rating | Silver |
|---|---|
| Overall Score | 57.78 |
| Liaison | Julia Carlow |
| Submission Date | May 6, 2021 |
| Executive Letter | Download |
American University of Sharjah
AC-7: Incentives for Developing Courses
| Status | Score | Responsible Party |
|---|---|---|
|
2.00 / 2.00 |
Does the institution have an ongoing program or programs that offer incentives for faculty in multiple disciplines or departments to develop new sustainability courses and/or incorporate sustainability into existing courses?:
A brief description of the program(s), including positive outcomes during the previous three years (e.g. descriptions of new courses or course content resulting from the program):
We formally started providing support to faculty in Fall 2019. In the first year we supported professors from one college. We are now regularly working with professors from all four colleges, professors are continuing to seek our support after their first interaction (so are keeping the sustainability-focused examples in their curriculum) and we are working with more professors each semester. We have officially created a KPI for our office regarding the support and will start to collect feedback through an annual survey of faculty starting this year.
We work with the professor to
* find relevant guest speakers and get speaker approval. (Note: speaker approval is a cumbersome process as AUS requiring copies of government issued documents, completing forms, copies of terminal degrees, and Ministry of Education approval. This process is so cumbersome that often professors opt to not engage outside speakers because of the extra work and the challenge to get it completed in time for the actual class presentation)
* Organize and pay for field trips to relevant sites, such as Dubai Sustainable City, Masdar, local organic farms, the Material Recovery Facilities, Cultural heritage site, Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week, etc.
*Provide case study data from the university for classes such as ECO 310: Cost-Benefit Analysis, CHE 491: Senior Design Project, ENV 100; Principles of Environmental Science, ENV 150: Intro to Environmental Science
A brief description of the incentives that faculty members who participate in the program(s) receive:
Over all, faculty are provided support from the AUS Sustainability office, in the form of funding or administrative support, to incorporate sustainability into their course. This is usually done through connecting class content to experiential learning with a focus on sustainability. For example MGT 403: Entrepreneurship - the class follows a new business owner throughout the class and we have worked with the class to find new sustainable companies and have worked with the professor to highlight these mission driven companies.
Additionally we have worked with DES 374 Package Design: we collaborated with the professor to find companies that were sustainability focused, trying to find way to reduce packaging and to create more sustainable packaging.
These types of collaborations have allowed us to connect faculty with new and different organizations as well as bring the idea of sustainability into classes where it was not before. This introduced students to the notion that whether they "work in sustainability" to succeed in their respective fields, they will need to understand sustainability concepts.
The website URL where information about the programs or initiatives is available:
Additional documentation to support the submission:
Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
The information presented here is self-reported. While AASHE staff review portions of all STARS reports and institutions are welcome to seek additional forms of review, the data in STARS reports are not verified by AASHE. If you believe any of this information is erroneous or inconsistent with credit criteria, please review the process for inquiring about the information reported by an institution or simply email your inquiry to stars@aashe.org.