University of Florida
AC-1: Academic Courses

Office of Sustainability Staff perused all syllabi for courses initially identified as being sustainability focused and sustainability related. Initial selection was performed by a consulting company Sustainability Education Services (SES) employing NVivo(TM) a qualitative data analysis application especially effective for identifying thematically related content. From the initial lists, further refinements were made by reviewing the course syllabi, and additional courses that had not been initially selected but were known to be related to sustainability were added to the list. The initial syllabi survey utilized the content analysis software, NVivo. Syllabi were collected by the Office of Sustainability from the internet, and then provided to the analyst. Maintaining departmental and college information as attributes, the data were uploaded to the software. Key word searches were run on the text of every document using the following sustainability related terms: air quality, appropriate technology, community development, earth charter, ecology, ecological economics, environment, environmental, environmental economics, environmental justice, environmental politics, green building, green business, green design, limits to growth, millennium development goals, new urbanism, our common future, resilience, social capital, social justice, social wellbeing, soil quality, soil science, sustainability, sustainable, sustainable development, waste, and water quality. This list of key words was derived from the analyst’s last five years of research and development within the sustainability education literature and sustainability curricula in higher education. From the original dataset of 5,666 these word frequencies narrowed the list of potentially relevant courses to 3,000. Those courses with only a single hit on any of the key words were next examined, and irrelevant courses were eliminated. The remaining courses were renamed to correspond with their course number and course title, and then examined and qualitatively assessed to be either sustainability focused, sustainability related, or unrelated. The sample was scanned three times during this process, searching for courses that were fully focused on sustainability. The resultant initial sample included 382 syllabi. Sixty three courses were identified as sustainability focused and 319 were identified as sustainability related