Overall Rating Platinum
Overall Score 85.74
Liaison Mike Wilson
Submission Date Dec. 13, 2023

STARS v2.2

University of Victoria
AC-1: Academic Courses

Status Score Responsible Party
Complete 14.00 / 14.00 Claire Irvine
Sustainability Coordinator
Campus Planning and Sustainability
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Part 1. Sustainability course offerings

Figures required to calculate the percentage of courses offered by the institution that are sustainability course offerings:
Undergraduate Graduate
Total number of courses offered by the institution 1,687 499
Number of sustainability-focused courses offered 218 36
Number of sustainability-inclusive courses offered 279 95

Percentage of courses that are sustainability course offerings:
28.73

Part 2. Sustainability course offerings by department

Total number of academic departments that offer courses:
47

Number of academic departments with sustainability course offerings:
43

Percentage of academic departments with sustainability course offerings:
91.49

Documentation

A copy of the institution’s inventory of its sustainability course offerings and descriptions:
Do the figures reported above cover one, two, or three academic years?:
One

A brief description of the methodology used to complete the course inventory :
Using Power Query in Excel, courses codes for the 2021-22 academic year were compared against the course inventory provided for the previous STARS assessment. Any matching courses previously offered and identified as either sustainability focussed or inclusive from the last STARS assessment were classified the same way again. Course titles and descriptions were then compared against the list of AASHE search terms provided. This was also cross-referenced with the search terms that would likely not be a match. Finally, courses were also compared with a list of search terms for the 17 UN SDGs, and were tagged if they contained any of those keywords in the titles or descriptions. Finally, courses with matching keywords from the AASHE search term list, or the SDG list were classified as either sustainability focussed or inclusive following a manual examination of the titles and descriptions. Courses without any of these matching keywords were assumed to not be sustainability focussed or inclusive.

Courses that were excluded from the total course count were determined by searching course titles that contained the following key words: [master, doctoral, thesis, special topics, theatre, physical ed, medic, clinical, independent, practicum, vikes (athletics), acting, advanced research (CHEM), topics, internship, honours, essay, compose, perform, paper, stage, orchestra, technique, sound, chorus, symphony, sing, brass, special studies, project, tuition, neuro, colloquium, seminar]. Once searched, courses were screened individually to determine applicability.

Academic departments at UVic are defined as described in the STARS technical manual; however, there are several interdisciplinary programs at UVic that are administered at the Faculty level, rather than at the level of any single academic department. To identify the number of academic departments offering sustainability courses at UVic, only courses directly administered by a department were considered (i.e. faculty-level programs were not counted as a separate department)

How were courses with multiple offerings or sections counted for the figures reported above?:
Each course was counted as a single course regardless of the number of offerings or sections

A brief description of how courses with multiple offerings or sections were counted:
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Optional Fields 

Website URL where information about the sustainability course offerings is available:
Additional documentation to support the submission:
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Data source(s) and notes about the submission:
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The information presented here is self-reported. While AASHE staff review portions of all STARS reports and institutions are welcome to seek additional forms of review, the data in STARS reports are not verified by AASHE. If you believe any of this information is erroneous or inconsistent with credit criteria, please review the process for inquiring about the information reported by an institution or simply email your inquiry to stars@aashe.org.