 Good afternoon everyone, apologies for you now having that song stuck in your head for the rest of the afternoon but welcome to this next session at OER 22. This session is online learning in a time of environmental crisis and I'm delighted to welcome Kate Lindsay from University College of Estate Management who is going to be speaking to us today. So without further ado I'm going to hand over to you Kate and let you get on with your presentation. Thank you Caroline. We all know that we are in the midst of a climate crisis. I'm not going to pull out some figures to bring the mood down to what is a really energetic and welcoming conference. My discussion today is really testing some ideas and using some research and some case studies to look at the relationship between online learning, open education and sustainability and I'd love your feedback either during the session in the chat or if you're watching the recording of the session via Twitter or contact me through my blog so I can develop these ideas further with you the community. Before I get into the body of the discussion today I just want to say a little bit about where I come from the institution that I work out because it's very relevant to how my ideas have developed for this presentation. So I am head of digital education at the University College of Estate Management. Now we are a fully online university. We offer degrees and degree apprenticeships in the area of the built environment so that covers construction, real estate, building, surveying and we have sustainability running throughout all of our programs in depth. The majority of our students study with us part-time about 98% of them they are in employment, full employment or part-time employment. Now we do have some on-ground activities so whilst all our education provision is online we do have a building. We have a headquarters in Central Reading which is the most sustainable university building in the UK. I'm very proud to say we do do some outreach activities so we go around to schools and engage school children with ideas about careers in built environment and also sustainability and we do hold an in-person on-ground graduation as well in Reading. Okay we are very proud to be in a credited institution of the NUS responsible futures and this is largely through items I've just talked about such as having very sustainable operating practice but also how we embed sustainability throughout all our modules and throughout our curriculum. The built environment sector is responsible for around 38% of all carbon energy related emissions worldwide so we have a key role in playing in influencing the sector and promoting change and we're about to embark on a very bold program of work to influence we're going to be looking at in depth how sustainable we are going to be through the way we teach, what we teach, how we operate and who we influence and whether we aim to be next zero carbon by 2030. I've mentioned the term carbon I just want to explain a few terms that I will refer to in this presentation as there is a lot of inconsistency in how terminology related to carbon and net zero is used and understood and likewise there is also a lack of academic definition in terms of carbon footprint and even more so in how it is measured. For the purposes of today when we discussed carbon emissions we're talking about CO2 released into the atmosphere as a result of human activity the biggest being the burning of fossil fuels for electricity, heat and transportation. It is the most common greenhouse gas emitted by human activity and thus it is the one that has the most impact on global warming and the one that is generally measured but there are other dangerous gases available I should just add. The carbon footprint is the impact of a person or organisational activity in terms of the carbon emitted into the atmosphere and when we talk about carbon neutral we are generally talking about the act of offsetting carbon emissions for investing in environmental projects such as clean energy schemes that are designed to reduce emissions or schemes that are designed to soak up emissions and soak up CO2 and this is traditionally seen without planting trees. Carbon net zero on the other hand means reducing carbon emissions to the very lowest amount with offsetting as a last resort. Before I move on I just want to make it clear that reducing carbon emissions alone does not equal sustainability. There are nine other sustainable development goals from the UN and we need to that need to be addressed to build a healthy inclusive and sustainable world and I will come back to that. Okay research on the assessment of carbon footprint of universities has been rapidly emerging over the last seven or eight years and has largely been focused on case study empirical research that employed quite a range of methodologies and analytical techniques which makes comparing the studies really tricky but overall the research points to the high level of staff and student transport of on-site consumption of energy as being key contributors to carbon footprint. A case study in the UK shows that eight percent of international students contributed to 10 percent of an institution's carbon footprint and if you're interested in some of those articles they're all open access and Caroline posted a link at the top of the chat of the chat here and I've also tweeted it today. Now there are a number of greening initiatives that HE institutions are adopting to tackle environmental but with the focus so heavily based around mobility of people and what's called operational carbon which is the day-to-day running online learning has become increasingly framed in terms of environmental benefits as it doesn't do much of these things to scale. It lowers the emissions of staff and students traveling to classes, video conferencing as opposed to large on-site events, reduced use of building services and all the carbon emissions that they produce. So here are some quotes that I found in the articles that I've been looking at recently. A famous article from a well-known article in 2015 with international movements towards radical online learning design such as massive open online courses, do you remember when you read the radical, pedagogical use of ICTs is auspicious for low carbon HE futures. The way of creating wider learning environment including new digital modalities has enormous potential to reduce harmful emissions to the environment. Online education alone can dramatically save energy and reduce carbon emissions. What many of these studies has lacked is the ability to really analyse the environmental impact of moving teaching and learning online. After all, studying or working from home for most people is not really carbon neutral. We are still going to university albeit via the means of devices and platforms and networks. We have become digit commuters. And I'd like us to take a few minutes now just to think about what these types of activities are. So the question to you attending today and if you are watching this afterwards is what are the sources of energy uses and carbon emissions for on-loan modalities of learning? If I could ask you to use the hashtag if you're watching this and type your answers to the question in the chat box or communicate digital and use the hashtag did you commute at the start of your answers that would be really great because I'm going to do a bit of nature analysis after this event and light it up. So I'll just leave you with that question. I'm going to move on but please feel free to add it into the chat or after the event via the other means are set. Okay, so the pandemic has provided a unique opportunity to explore the carbon footprint of higher education delivered on and off campus via the governmental lockdown orders that required universities to effectively close their campus and their buildings, help business travel and move teaching and learning online. This study by Filamonu and Archer et al represents a first known attempt to compare a carbon footprint of a mid-sized UK university that produced during the COVID-19 lockdown between April and June 2020 against that generated within the respective time period in previous years and what the main contributors to carbon emissions was. The table on the right shows the additional processes measured compared to those on the left pre lockdown. Over the COVID period they measured staff and students computers being on between nine and five, electricity consumption and meals and breaks of a study or a teaching day. They found that although the overall carbon footprint of the university decreased by 30% during lockdown largely due to buildings not being in as much use, the carbon intensity of online teaching and learning was found to be substantial, so substantial in fact that it was almost equal to that of staff and student commuting in the pre lockdown period. This suggests that unlike previous studies have argued online teaching and learning may be less climate friendly than it was thought to be. However, some other studies have conducted the pandemic period had very different results. For instance, the study of carbon footprints of universities in central China by Yenet al found that the online education significantly reduced energy consumption and led to lower carbon emissions. Again, this study focused on the measurement of transportation and energy consumption. In both these studies and in some others that I have read, I think we can apply a good deal of what we call displacement theory by focusing on the things that we can easily measure alone. In these cases, mobility and energy consumption, the whole life carbon impact of online learning which could could significantly change the picture. And when I say whole life impact, I mean taking into account the carbon required to source the materials, produce the devices, transport those laptops and those digital devices to the people who are going to use them and the waste at the end of their life, the picture could look quite different. And as Nilsel and so says, net tech beyond limit, the continued expansion of digital technology throughout education can in no way be rationalised as somehow offsetting the hugely detrimental nature of the full life cycle of digital products and processes that go to make up net tech. Salwin also states that we are dealing largely with the future of unknowns and disruption. The pandemic has shown us that we cannot presume that educational technology will always be available, accessible and abundant for our learners today. After all, it is an industry built on the mining of precious metals and depleting natural resources. So how can universities approach this? Yes, we must work towards net zero, reduce carbon emissions and also look for alternative pedagogies that can support a more sustainable but also more unpredictable future. But we do need to go beyond HG Carbon Reduction Program and develop learners skills and values, attitudes and behaviours to address sustainability issues. In our role as providers of higher education, we are important promoters and advocates of the global agenda for sustainable development. And this is because we can shape the mindset of future decision makers, multiplying knowledge and action around sustainability and criticality in the way we live in the world, embedding open practices in terms of how we develop and provide learning opportunities and make a critical contribution to achieving the aims of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. In particular, Sustainable Development Goal 4, which is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote life-long learning opportunities. I would like to end this discussion with a presentation of two case studies, two short online courses that we have developed at UCM. We are a very small institution, so when we want to develop online educational products, we need to choose those carefully and really understand the ones that are going to have the most impact for our own organisational goals towards sustainability and the way we want to influence the sector that we serve. Okay, the first short course that we developed and launched last year was in collaboration with the Princes Foundation called the Rapid Planning Toolkit. The cities with the fastest rates of urbanisation have the least professional resources in the built environment sector, and the vast majority of this is limited to resource found in capital cities, not secondary cities. Now secondary cities are cities with people from less than one million population, but they face the same challenges as the really big cities and they're growing at a massive rate with a big threat towards sustainability. We have collaborated with the Princes Foundation to turn an on-ground based learning program into an online toolkit and a series of short courses to enable a more rapid response and planning, guiding local leaders such as mayors to shape, articulate and implement a vision and plan for growth that can effectively demonstrate a tangible impact for their citizens and deliver against the key sustainable development goal targets at the same time. We've been working with them for the past year or so to design how this can be delivered online through a series of short courses, each one a level up from the next building up from understanding the key principles of a toolkit and case studies of its application to developing a city charter, implementation on the ground and final evaluation. The first of these courses was March on Cities today, last year. And what's interesting about the design of this course is it's completely in line with who the learner cohorts are. Often mayors, local councillors and community groups in countries with very little resource, especially in the way of IT equipment. We use universal design for learning principles and the course is designed in a way that can be easily understood by non-built environment professionals and easily accessible. It can be downloaded as booklets and workbooks or it can be projected onto a screen if there's only one laptop. It's designed in a way so that people can crowd around one computer and read the course material easily. It's no means data heavy. It's mobile responsive for us, for use out on the ground with plenty of examples to show its application. We've trialed the toolkit with groups in the Gambia, Trinidad de Bego, Pakistan, Malaysia, New Zealand and Fiji and received really positive feedback for those travels and we're looking forward to learning about its impact on a wide scale. The second short course that we developed last year and made available openly was launched at COP26 and this was quite differently designed. The energy and carbon in the built environment course is part of a sweet plan to be developed by the climate framework. They are a transdisciplinary initiative uniting the building industry and academia for climate action. This is a 25-hour short CPD course and it's aimed at professionals in the sector but open to anyone in the public who wants to develop their understanding of sustainable property adaptions and design and I have to say that I did take elements of this course myself when I was doing some home renovations recently and did make some decisions based on the materials that I used for my course. We have made a conscious effort in the design of this course to bring sustainable approaches into design. The interviews with experts were conducted over Zoom and we used some nifty post-production technique to make it not look like a simple Zoom recording and whilst we did travel to Watford to 3D scan the majority of the sustainable properties at the BRE park what we have now is a portfolio of interactive walkthrough case studies that we can reuse and make available to all so they do not have to travel to inspect similar buildings and can save money with groups traveling to see them. Our learners are living and working in the built environment. They have a laboratory at their fingertips and we invite them to apply and consolidate what they are learning by observing and analysing the buildings around them. Online learning doesn't always have to be sat at a laptop. To date we have had 1,629 active learners on the platform 20% of which have been awarded certificate for being successful in the course assessment which we are really pleased with. What is important to note that for both these open courses is that they have been designed and produced to the same high academic and quality standards as our undergraduate and postgraduate online degree programme. They are fully accessible, they meet all our normal benchmarks, they meet our standards and they are inclusive and for a small non-profit institution like ourselves this is a significant investment being open to come at a cost but we do know that there is a requirement for academically rigorous information in this sector as one of our learners said back to us. I have a strong desire to do more to reduce whole life carbon across projects I work on but I have found significant mixed messaging around this. As such it is quite intimidating trying to find a single source of truth. This course does an excellent job of suing all the current relevant sources and distilling out the core principles. I will be making frequent use of the references found in this course. To close I would like to pose a question to the community and maybe that's something we can just appear and carry on the conversation asynchronously afterwards is how far does open education for sustainable development make a university more sustainable? So if you could type those questions the answers to that in the text box or using the hashtag again open the SD it will start to be answered that would be really great and I would like to pose that question there and hear your feedback and thoughts that you have. Thank you. Thank you Kate. We've got some responses to your earlier question in the chat if you want to to have a look at those while we while we wait on the responses to this one. I can pop those up on the screen so we've got Sarah Verves from Palestine. Yes and yeah I think the data just data in itself is so energy hungry isn't it and as the more data we have the more carbon we are using the more energy we are using. I read somewhere in a recent study it might be Neal Selwyn's study actually that actually training machine learning algorithm is the equivalent of the of six cars CO2 production over their lifetime which just blew my mind a bit. Yeah so there's a lot of things I think we don't think about and I think the studies that I've looked at they're very much focused on you know it's electricity use at home and very you know it's right to do that so you're sat at home you may have the light on or you may be using gas you may have the heating on you use the kettle the microwave like they said but the actual actions that you take inside your laptop and how where the stuff that comes to your laptop comes from as well you know the service and things I don't think we we're not considering that enough when we're thinking about the carbon footprint of online learning and I've been wondering if something like a module is a really like we design modules 20 credit modules they have you know we have seven to eight hours of learning a week in that module so it's a day our students will probably be fully online or two half days and there's certain activities that they do in that module that you can attribute a carbon footprint to like doing a library search or a Google search or watching a video and I wonder if that would be quite an interesting way to start to try and analyze what you know a much more detailed carbon footprint is yeah we've we've had some great innovative ideas I definitely agree with the boiling the kettle thing I drink a lot more tea from home than I ever did in an office and you can see that creeping up um so we haven't got any responses yet to your second question in the chat box so if anyone would like to answer that question how far does open education for sustainable development make a university more sustainable please pop those answers into the chat or um or you can post them on twitter using the hashtag um oh here we go Teresa has a comment here um have tweeted link to my cover in article on sustainability of teaching brilliant thank you I look at that and there's some really nice stuff um and if our time will call the internet open university as well the first teach project I think I don't know if that's similar but um yeah there's so there's so much more to look at here and I think it's so much more complex than um what some of the studies present great so I know we've got a little bit of a lag between what we're saying and what what everyone on youtube can see due to the the live comment but um if anyone has any further questions or comments they'd like to to share with Kate please do add those into the chat or you can carry on the conversation on twitter or on discord um in our chat there there's the day for the online sessions chat um we have one more here from entrecom ireland um hashtag open est if used then great I think this is the most important thing universities can do to influence and help people make changes for the better and especially if it's good for us all now I absolutely agree with that and and you know the development of our two short courses we thought very hard and talks a lot with industry about what would have the most impact um two very different areas one and secondary cities in the global south um which are really struggling with any with having expertise and planning in the built environment people just don't have the job in those cities so that was one thing yes we're going to get involved in that and then the whole energy and carbon in the built environment piece it's so important but there's so many professionals in the industry who don't have the language to to join in that discussion and their companies and start influencing them and so that was really why we developed that course as well um and part of our program work going forward as well about you know doing more for our students to empower them to go out into the sector into industry and influence others I think that that's cool a very noble cause I think we can all agree on that one um so if there are no further questions at the moment obviously we can carry on the conversation on twitter or on discord um but it's just left for me to say thank you very much to Kate for speaking with us today that's been really interesting and um I hope you enjoy the rest of the conference thank you