Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
AC-1: Academic Courses

A listing of courses offered during the AY 2021-2022 (Summer 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022) was obtained from the registrar. Duplicate sections, cross-listed courses, internships, practicums, special topics, and graduate courses were eliminated.

Any courses identified by Penn State University Park (main campus) as 'Sustainability Related" or "Sustainability Focused" were similarly identified as such on our campus.

Remaining courses were reviewed and evaluated using the material found in the course descriptions available through the online Course Bulletin. The sustainability director worked with a set of student sustainability ambassadors (n=7), representing all schools within the college, to review the classes. Students were able to provide perspective on course coverage beyond what is simply included in the course descriptions. Additionally we used an automated process (see below) and compared our by-hand classification of courses to the automated classification; In all cases, we felt our conservative, personalized experience approach made more sense.

Although it is possible that we have misidentified some courses using this approach, we believe this to be a conservative estimate of sustainability courses offered at Penn State Behrend. Our numbers are comparable to those from Penn State University Park. Additionally we tried using an R-code following the process by USC (https://github.com/USC-Office-of-Sustainability/USC-SDG-Curriculum). We found that the USC keyword list DRAMATICALLY increased the number of courses IDed as related or inclusive. We also used the University of Auckland keyword list, which provided much more moderate results, but still higher than our classification by hand. Here we report our by-hand classification, which seemed much more conservative than either of the automated approaches.

The course counts provided above include only courses actually offered during academic year 2021-2022 (Summer 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022).

Following guidance in the STARS Technical Bulletin, we removed from the course counts, courses in the following categories: independent study, practicums/ internships, thesis/ research, other individual research (*94/*95/*96 courses), ARMY, KINES, cross-listed courses and graduate level courses.