Amherst College
IL-3: Sustainability Course Inventory

A complete list of course offerings for the Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, and Spring 2024 semesters was obtained by web scraping Amherst’s Course Catalog. The dataset includes information on course titles, IDs, department listings, descriptions, and semesters offered. Following AASHE’s exclusion criteria, all courses in the following categories were removed from the dataset: special topics; half-credit courses (labs, discussions, music lessons, performance art classes); senior honors/thesis; internships; practicums; and independent study. 

After cleaning the dataset of course descriptions, a student intern used the text2sdg R package to detect keywords corresponding to each of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Six different query systems were implemented: Aurora, Elsevier, SIRIS, SDSN, OSDG, and USC’s published keyword list. Courses with two or more keyword hits were considered for the final inventory.

Following USC's classification method, we divided SDGs into two clusters: social/economic SDGs (1-5, 8-11, 16, 17) and environmental SDGs (6, 7, 12, 13, 14, 15). Courses that mapped to SDGs in both clusters were tagged as sustainability-focused, and courses that mapped to only one cluster were tagged as sustainability-inclusive. Any courses whose distinctions were not clear were set aside for determination.

After a round of review by two Office staff members, suggestions and edits to course classifications were incorporated into the final course inventory.

The Office has published the inventory here, as a publicly accessible Shiny App. Users of the app can select a specific SDG of interest to see the list of suggested courses, based on the keyword association from the course description. For each course listed, users can see the list of associated SDG keywords.