Auburn University
ER-5: Sustainability Course Identification

Sustainability-focused courses concentrate on the concept of sustainability, including its social, economic, and environmental aspects, or examine an issue or topic using sustainability as a lens. Sustainability-related courses incorporate sustainability as a distinct component or module but not as the primary focus of the course.

Using the online Schedule of Courses for each semester, staff members in Academic Sustainability Programs compiled lists of all courses offered by each department on campus during Fall 2010-Fall 2012. Then we removed all courses that were online-only outreach courses that were not taught in person on campus (= courses ending in 06), and laboratory-only courses (ending in 01) that must be taken together with lecture courses, so that linked laboratory and lecture courses were counted together as one course each. We also excluded courses in which students did not meet as a group formally with instructors, such as independent study and senior capstone project courses. We were left with all courses taught in person on campus in which instructors met formally with groups of students for regular instruction. We then set up meetings with faculty members in each department, to examine the course lists and determine which courses were sustainability-focused and sustainability-related, using the Auburn University definitions for these course types. We added notes concerning course content to these lists, to explain what types of content justified the inclusion of each course in each of these 2 categories. Then the total number and percent of sustainability courses of both types were calculated for each department, and the course lists with the content notes and calculations were posted online.