Hold onto your butts! In this episode Mike is joined by learning designers Paul Astles, Catriona Matthews, and Hayley Johns to answer the sustainably silly question:
“What can Jurassic Park teach us about embedding sustainability in course design?”
From Dr. Ian Malcolm’s chaos theory quotes to water ripples in the T-Rex scene, the team uses Spielberg’s classic dinosaur doings to illustrate UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development competencies. Along the way, they discuss why sustainability in education goes far beyond environmental concerns, how to bring these concepts into any subject area, and why it’s important to “meet academics where they are” when designing courses sustainably.
There’s also a lot of Jurassic park trivia, and sneakily snuck in quotes. It’s the best.
As a billy bonus, here’s the links we reference in the episode:
- Sustainability resources on the OU Learning Design Blog. These include the skills cards and a workshop resource
- The book chapter referenced is ‘Communicating sustainability competencies: a case study of sustainability and learning design’ and it will be in the book ‘Education for Sustainable Development: The Contribution of Universities’ in the ‘World Sustainability Series’ published by Springer.
- Three blog posts on the topic in chronological order: ‘Reflections on ALT conference 2023: Supporting colleagues to take practical actions to embed sustainability’, Going for Green: Learning Design sustainability champions, EAUC Conference 2024: Reflecting and connecting with sustainability.
- An OpenLearn course that uses some of the resources referenced: Supporting climate action through digital education
- And finally, the resources themselves on OpenLearn: Learning Design resources to support embedding sustainability competencies and learning outcomes in course materials.