Stanford University
AC-1: Academic Courses

All courses offered in the 2015-16 school year were perused and sorted by title and course description into the categories of “Sustainability Focused,” “Includes Sustainability,” and courses unrelated to sustainability. Each course was critically evaluated on its relationship to the multidimensional goal of promoting sustainability on both local and global levels. The definition of “sustainability” used when identifying courses was as follows: having a focus on and concern for the healthy maintenance and development of society environmentally, economically, and socially. The course descriptions were the most important factor of classification; if a course described a sustainability goal such as renewable energy research or ecological education as a primary or secondary objective, that course was listed as “Sustainability Focused” or “Includes Sustainability” respectively. For courses with sustainability in the title, the course description was also perused to ensure that it was focused on a relevant type of sustainability; for example, “Conjure and Manifest: Building a Sustainable Artistic Practice” (CSRE 8) has “sustainable” in the title, but is actually a course focused on helping artists improve their personal methodology and craft, so it was not listed as a sustainability course offering. Courses that have a strong social or economic sustainability component but not an environmental component were included as sustainability-related.

Staff also worked closely with the university's Institutional Research and Decision Support (IR&DS) team to determine the best way to categorize the classes offered. In the totals above, one course is counted as a class offered during a single term, regardless of the number of study sections offered within that course. If a course was offered in each of the three quarters in the 2015-16 academic year, it is included as three separate courses. Undergraduate courses are identified as any course with a course number of 0 to 199, while graduate courses are identified as any course with a 200-level course number or above. However, at Stanford, there is significant overlap between undergraduate and graduate enrollment in many courses.

Staff also worked with IR&DS to determine the number of individually directed classes, classes with enrollment of four or fewer, physical education classes, performance art classes, and clinical courses. Ultimately, staff decided that all independent study and classes with four or fewer should be included in the inventory, as it is common for those to include sustainability, and they are equally as valuable to sustainability education as other courses with higher enrollment. On the other hand, performance arts, physical education, and clinical courses were all removed from both the sustainability class totals and the total class count for academic year 2015-16. This detailed analytic process was performed very carefully and with the input of many campus stakeholders, including Stanford faculty, in order to ensure utmost accuracy.

After this decision-making and calculation process and consultation with Stanford faculty, staff generated a final list of sustainability courses and courses that include sustainability based on all of the above criteria. The new list has been uploaded to the Sustainable Stanford website at https://sustainable.stanford.edu/resources/library/2016-sustainability-course-list. It has also been disseminated to several interested parties, including the Haas Center for Public Service and the School of Earth Sciences. Based on this thorough process, Stanford feels confident that it generated the most accurate and complete list possible of sustainability courses and courses that include sustainability at the university.

Each offering of a course in a single term was counted as a single course. In other words, if the course was offered in all three quarters, it was counted as three separate courses. However, sections within courses (where TAs typically review material from the lecture with the students in smaller groups) was not counted as a separate course. Essentially, each offering of a course was counted as a single course, but each course was counted as a single course regardless of the number of "sections."

Below, it is noted that internships are included in the inventory. Only a small number of internships at Stanford have course numbers, but any internships with a course number are included in both the sustainability course inventory and the total class count.