Boise State University
AC-1: Academic Courses

This academic course overview was developed with support from the Boise State University Registrar’s Office, Provost’s Office and CAES Energy Policy Institute. The data set was provided by the Registrar’s Office and reflects one academic year - Fall 2019, Spring 2020, and Summer 2020.
The following logic was used to filter the course registry system to produce the data that was evaluated:
Obvious course repeats or duplicate sections were removed. This ensured that each course was counted as a single course regardless of the number of offerings or sections.
Courses with zero enrollment were removed.
Individually-directed courses and strictly project or practice-oriented courses such as thesis, dissertation, internships, foreign study, conference or workshop and professional development were removed.
The aforementioned filtering process reduced the number of observations in the dataset from 20,824 to 3,016 courses. Please note that cross-listed courses across multiple departments currently remain in the data set. Course repeats with variation in the graduate and undergraduate levels also remained in the evaluated data set.
To identify sustainability-focused and sustainability-related courses, the following steps were taken:
Course titles and course descriptions were manually reviewed multiple times by the EPI team to check if courses were identifiable as sustainability-focused or sustainability-related or uncertain or neither based on the criteria in the STARs Technical Manual.
Any course that indicates a primary and explicit focus on sustainability, on the application of sustainability within a field or on a major sustainability challenge was classified as sustainability-focused. Any course that incorporates sustainability into the course content was classified as sustainability-related. Any course that had the potential to be classified as either sustainability-focused or sustainability-related, but which needed more information was flagged for further review.
The culled list was shared for comment by the Academic and Research Subcommittee of the Sustainability Governance Council and then shared with the Provost Office.
For courses that were classified as uncertain, the Office of the Provost requested department chairs to clarify the sustainability applicability of the given entries for which there wasn’t sufficient information.
Based on the feedback, the uncertain courses were reclassified as either sustainability-focused, sustainability-related or neither.
This analysis concluded that 5.18% of the 3,016 courses offered in the academic year were either sustainability-focused or sustainability-related.
Number of Sustainability-related Undergraduate Courses
94
Number of Sustainability-focused Undergraduate Courses
29
Number of Sustainability-related Graduate Courses
22
Number of Sustainability-focused Graduate Courses
11

In this inventory, academic departments are defined as a discipline-specific department.

Obvious course repeats or duplicate sections were removed. This ensured that each course was counted as a single course regardless of the number of offerings or sections.
Courses with zero enrollment were removed.
Individually-directed courses and strictly project or practice-oriented courses such as thesis, dissertation, internships, foreign study, conference or workshop and professional development were removed.