Overall Rating Gold
Overall Score 72.00
Liaison Jessica Krejcik
Submission Date Dec. 22, 2021

STARS v2.2

Concordia University
AC-1: Academic Courses

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete 9.76 / 14.00 Cassandra Lamontagne
Sustainability Coordinator
Office of Sustainability
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Figures required to calculate the percentage of courses offered by the institution that are sustainability course offerings:
Undergraduate Graduate
Total number of courses offered by the institution 2,997 1,843
Number of sustainability-focused courses offered 104 33
Number of sustainability-inclusive courses offered 330 59

Percentage of courses that are sustainability course offerings:
10.87

Total number of academic departments that offer courses:
53

Number of academic departments with sustainability course offerings:
43

Percentage of academic departments with sustainability course offerings:
81.13

A copy of the institution’s inventory of its sustainability course offerings and descriptions:
Do the figures reported above cover one, two, or three academic years?:
Three

A brief description of the methodology used to complete the course inventory :
A series of keyword searches were employed to identify courses with sustainability content, to differentiate these as “sustainability-focused” or “sustainability inclusive” and to assign one or more United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to the resulting course list. No courses were taken out prior to the word search and courses with multiple offerings or sections were counted as one course.

The first keyword list contained 255 independent entries and was obtained from STARS 2.2 support document list. These keywords were originally derived from the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as well as the Earth Charter and compiled into a single list. The keyword search was applied to all courses on the Student Information System (SIS) course list after it was filtered to display courses that had been offered at least once between 2018-2021. Courses were then manually reviewed to ensure that they included actual sustainability content. It is important to note that the 2020-2021 course offerings remain relatively unchanged despite the new online teaching method due to COVID-19 safety regulations.

A second keyword analysis was used to identify the extent to which sustainability was included in each course. Courses were considered to be either sustainability-focused or sustainability-inclusive based on STARS 2.2 guidelines.

For the second keyword analysis, the list was narrowed down to 41 keywords. These were selected in support of the sustainability-focused category defined above, because they inherently imply both social, economic and environmental elements. These words are in bold in Appendix A and include words such as ecosystem*, resilienc*, food insecurity and traditional knowledge.

Finally, each keyword was labelled with one or more of the UN SDGs using keywords found specifically in the SDG description online. Courses were assigned SDGs relevant to the course content based on the description and title provided from the SIS data obtained through the Concordia Open Data Portal.

How were courses with multiple offerings or sections counted for the figures reported above?:
Each course was counted as a single course regardless of the number of offerings or sections

A brief description of how courses with multiple offerings or sections were counted:
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Website URL where information about the sustainability course offerings is available:
Additional documentation to support the submission:
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Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
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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.