Université de Sherbrooke
AC-1: Academic Courses

The Office of the Vice-President, Administration and Sustainable Development (VRADD), is responsible for the collection and evaluation of data for the AC1 credit. Below are the steps that led to the completion of the inventory of academic offers related to sustainable development at the Université de Sherbrooke, at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

TOTAL NUMBER OF UNDERGRADUATE AND GRADUATE COURSES

The Office of the Registrar, Statistics and Student Data Section, generated a database from the "with registration" activity codes for the 2020-2021 fiscal year, allowing for the inclusion of only those courses that were taught during the selected period (N = 3688).

Activities with four or fewer enrolments as specified in the Stars technical manual were excluded. University of the Third Age activities that are not credited activities were also excluded as well as the activities of the Co-op Work Term and Professional Development and medical courses dedicated to clinical practice. For administrative reasons, some courses are associated with faculties and not with departments in the management information system for academic activities.

NUMBER OF SUSTAINABILITY-FOCUSED AND SUSTAINABILITY-INCLUSIVE COURSES

The title, the training target, and the content of the 3688 courses were successively analyzed according to a process of detecting the presence of sustainable development themes and/or specific keywords taken from the following references:

• The indications given by AASHE (Version 2.2 | 2019) in the Standards and terms section of the manual for the AC1 credit.
• The themes highlighted by the Portrait de la recherche en développement durable au Québec 2000-2010 [EN: Portrait of sustainable development research in Quebec]. This list includes sixty sustainable development research themes.
• The sustainable development vocabulary developed by the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) [EN: Québec Office of the French Language] and the Ministère de l'Environnement et de la Lutte contre les changements climatiques (MDDELCC) [EN: Ministry of the Environment and the Fight against Climate Change].
• The themes addressed in the UN's sustainable development goals.

The methodology allowed for a systematic classification of courses according to the following three possibilities:
• Courses classified as sustainability-focused
• Courses classified as sustainability-inclusive
• Excluded courses, those that do not meet the established criteria

The community of professors was also consulted as needed to further analyze the classification of particular courses. Thus, in addition to the analysis of training targets, some courses were classified as sustainability-focused or sustainability-inclusive as a result of these exchanges.

Please see the Sustainability-focused courses inventory in the field "A copy of the institution’s inventory of its sustainability course offerings and descriptions", and the Sustainability-inclusive courses inventory in the field "Additional documentation to support the submission".

Courses with multiple offerings were counted as one course either in the "focused" or "inclusive" figures as well as in "total course offering" figure.

REFERENCES

AASHE, 2019. STARS, Technical Manual, Version 2.2, Administrative Update Three, Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. 320 p.
Published on STARS-2.2-Technical-Manual.pdf (aashe.org)

Le Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) [EN : The Quebec Research Fund - Society and Culture] (2013) and Portrait de la recherche en développement durable au Québec (2000-2010) [EN : Portrait of sustainable development research in Québec].
Published on http://www.scientifique-en-chef.gouv.qc.ca/wp-content/uploads/Portrait_DD.pdf

Ministère du développement durable, de l’environnement et des changements climatiques (MDDELCC) [EN: Ministry of the Environment and the Fight against Climate Change], 2016. The terminology of sustainable development has been selected in https://www.oqlf.gouv.qc.ca/ressources/bibliotheque/dictionnaires/terminologie_deve_durable.aspx

United Nations (2015), Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Published on http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/70/1&Lang=E

NOTE : NUMBER OF ACADEMIC DEPARTMENTS

The total number of academic departments that offer courses (50) excludes departments providing for clinical teaching (Clinical courses offered exclusively to doctoral students – professional practice), just as clinical courses are excluded from the inventory of sustainability courses offered by the institution. Departments that exclusively do research have also been excluded. In addition, some interpretations in relation to specific courses, which are offered by department-like units, have been made. This explains the difference between the total number of academic departments as seen under this credit and the total number of academic departments (55) reported under PRE5 (Academics and Demographics).