HEC Montréal
AC-1: Academic Courses

For the purpose of reporting, we have selected one academic year (2019-20). Because there have been major updates to course titles and codification, including courses from the previous year would create a challenge.
The Sustainable Development Office and the Office of the Registrar compiled a list of all courses given from the past academic years (2019-20). From this list, all courses with the following criteria were excluded:
- Courses that contained fewer than 5 students were removed from the list.
- Courses that were not credited by HEC Montréal
- Special topics (courses from preparatory year/non-credit courses)
- Courses that are given in more than one language or more than one semester are counted one time only.
To help its student, HEC Montréal courses codes uses standardizes letters and numbers (e.g. XYZ 12345). Letters refer to the course subject (e.g. Management (MNGT), Ethics (ETHI), Sustainability and CSR (DDRS) etc.) and numbers refer to the program (10000 for bachelor, 50000 for MSc, 80000 for PhD, etc.).
Courses classified under the themes “sustainability and CSR” are identified as sustainability-focused courses.
For Sustainability-inclusive course identification, a more complex approached was required.
First, all courses offered in the last year (2019-2020) were perused and sorted critically according to the article: Key competencies in sustainability: reference framework for academic program development. Thus, each course selected has at least one of the five competencies described in this article. The definition of “sustainability” used when identifying courses was as follows: Courses that give the means to students to improve social and environmental challenges while guaranteeing that economic ways will support those means.
Moreover, to validate this first screening, a representative selection of 25% courses (160 in total) that are not SD/CSR themed were analyzed in detail, using course syllabi and in dept review of courses content. The methodology for this in-depth analysis was based on previous work conducted by HEC Professor Emmanuel Raufflet (Paola Schmitt Figueiró, Emmanuel Raufflet,Sustainability in higher education: a systematic review with focus on management education,Journal of Cleaner Production,Volume 106,2015,Pages 22-33,)

All courses offered during the considered period were counted only once, with no regards if it was offered during 1, 2 or 3 semesters, or to more than one group per semester.