 Good morning or good afternoon. My name is Alexis Carr and I'm here with my colleague Kayla Ortlieb We're from the Commonwealth of Learning, which is based in Burnaby, BC, Canada The Commonwealth of Learning is an intergovernmental organization Which is concerned with the promotion of open and distance learning for sustainable development Our co-authors Dr. Stanley Modesto, Dr. Kay Balasubramanian and Mr. John Lesperance were unavailable to be here today We will be presenting our paper Which is Delivery Mode and Learner Emissions, a comparative study from Botswana We'd like to thank the organizers of the International Symposium on Climate Change and the role of education for allowing us to present virtually We're going to start by providing some context for the research The education sector is responsible for a growing environmental footprint attributed to both institutional and learner-generated emissions As global tertiary enrollments continue to rise, it is necessary to critically assess the environmental sustainability of higher education in its current form With the introduction of the global sustainable development goals, there's a growing focus on sustainability Especially among higher education However, much of the focus is on institutional infrastructure and consumption and waste While little attention is given to how mode of delivery, particularly through its impact on learner behaviors, can affect emissions This is a particular interest to our organization and our partners as we are looking to improve access to education through open and distance learning There's a general assumption that open and distance learning is an environmentally sustainable or an inherently green mode of education However, there's been little research conducted on the environmental sustainability of complex higher education teaching models We've provided some examples here of studies that have shown the environmental benefit of open and distance learning For example, a 2011 study by Campbell and Campbell looked at the travel of 100 distance education students over the course of one semester The distance education mode resulted in a 5 to 10 ton reduction of greenhouse gas emissions However, the study did not look beyond travel to see how other behaviors may impact or may have impacted emissions Probably the most comprehensive of these studies is assessed teach project, which was done by the open university uk The project compared the carbon emissions of ICT enhanced courses with online courses and mainly face-to-face talk courses Here we have a screenshot of the online Calculator from the sestich methodology See as you can see the sestich carbon calculator aims to help students calculate their study related carbon impacts and the carbon calculator includes carbon conversion factors from things such as ICT equipment purchased or used for study regular and occasional travel to and from university accommodation As well as types of residential accommodation, etc The carbon impacts are measured using information entered about study hours or cat's credits applicable to a course or module and the duration of the course or module The findings from the study showed that online and blended ICT enhanced distance teaching models had Significantly lower environmental impacts than face-to-face teaching modes In our literature review, we came across several research gaps At the international level, ODL is not duly considered or highlighted in many international policies and recommendations related to carbon emissions and higher education In terms of academic research, the bulk of the current literature is based on analysis of institutions in the uk There's a lack of Research done in the developing country context Inferring similar results for developing countries is problematic for several reasons including electricity emission factors, which vary from country to country financial and regulatory frameworks and potential lower consumption rates due to economic constraints This means there's an important gap in research to explore In terms of learner emissions in developing countries A second gap is in relation to demographic traits, which haven't been thoroughly explored For learner related carbon emissions vis-a-vis mode of delivery This is interesting because a lot of other studies done just on personal carbon footprints have explored the different The relationship between demographics and the personal carbon footprint and findings suggest that consumption patterns and thus personal emissions Are indeed affected by individual demographic characteristics It could be suggested then that differences between the carbon emissions of ODL and face-to-face learners is not the result of mode of delivery But rather that they are determined by demographic traits that have not been considered With these research gaps in mind, we wanted to look In the developing country context to see whether learner emissions were were different between ODL and face-to-face learners We selected a partner institution in Botswana who was offering a CD based blended program and a similar program offered by another institution in Botswana, but face-to-face And we looked at this research question here Is there a difference between the carbon emissions of CD based ODL and face-to-face learners as well as the main sources of learners emissions? We are now just going to provide a brief overview of the specific methodology used for this study This includes a selection of universities Sampling including the institutional program and individual level sampling The data collection process including the adaption of the sestiche methodology As well as the data analysis So as previously mentioned, we selected two institutions for this study from Botswana The first was the Botswana College of Distance and Open Learning or Bokodal Which is now actually called the Botswana Open University And the second was the Botswana Accountancy College or BAC Bokodal uses open and distance learning while BAC is a conventional face-to-face institution From BAC, the face-to-face bachelor's in entrepreneurship and business leadership was selected and from Bokodal The comparable CD based blended bachelor's in business and entrepreneurship was chosen These programs are selected because they are the most similar units available for comparison Now we'll go through the data collection and sampling Semi-structured questionnaires were developed based on the sestiche methodology of CARED et al The sestiche methodology involves the calculation of learner and institutional emissions to assess the carbon-based environmental impact of higher education models For our present study, we only focused on the learner emissions and we also adapted the questionnaire for the context of Botswana One of the main adaptations is the calculation of the learner carbon footprint based on semester rather than 100 study hours Or 10 cat hours as the institution surveyed do not calculate their programs in terms of study hours The questionnaire was then piloted with two students from each institution These revised surveys were canvas face-to-face at both the Bokodal and BAC campuses 68 percent of Bokodal and 65 percent of BAC students were present and completed the survey This sample size ensures a greater than 90 confidence level and a less than 10 percent margin of error To collect data on institutional carbon emissions, various staff members from the respective institutions were interviewed and institutional records were then analyzed The data analysis was then conducted using IBM's statistical package for social science or SPSS All differences are tested for significance and were reported only if statistically significant Now we'll take a look at the results from this study So we'll assess the emissions by group, the Bokodal group, which is again the CD-based blended program Compared to the BAC group, which is the face-to-face program We'll also break down the results according to the different components of the SUS-Teach methodology All of the results presented were tested using independent samples T-Test for statistical significance Any result presented has been shown to be statistically significant Overall, the study found that the average carbon footprint of the face-to-face mode BAC group was nearly three times greater than that of the distance mode Bokodal group The table on this slide lists the components of the overall carbon footprint calculation In order from the greatest difference in emissions between the two groups to the least As you can see, BAC has higher emissions on average in every component The largest discrepancy that you see in this table between the emissions can be seen in the travel category Within the travel category, the travel-related emissions generated on average by the face-to-face program BAC students is more than six times higher than the average from Bokodal students This graph here shows the total learning related CO2 emissions in kilograms per semester As you can see, the Bokodal group, which is the CD-based blended group in orange Generated approximately 210 kilos of CO2 In comparison, BAC, which is the face-to-face group shown in blue here, generated 614 kilos So as you saw from the previous slide, there was a significant difference between the overall emissions generated by the Bokodal group and the BAC group The total overall difference in emissions was just over 403 kilograms of CO2 Based on this total overall difference, we wanted to further examine the contributing factors to this The Sustage methodology is broken down into various components Which of these components contributed the most to learner emissions? Were there differences between the two groups? So now let's take a look at the breakdown of emissions by category As you can see, on the left-hand side, there's a pie chart showing the breakdown of emissions of the Bokodal students Which is the CD-based distance program The number one contributor to their total emissions was ICT purchased So this would include laptops, tablets, computers, or other ICT that were purchased specifically for their studies On the right-hand side, we have the pie chart showing the emissions of the BAC students In comparison, the number one contributor to emissions for the BAC students was travel If we go back and look at the pie chart on the left-hand side, the Bokodal pie chart The second biggest contributor was on-campus energy use Whereas in the BAC group, the second biggest contributor was ICT purchased For Bokodal, the distance students, travel was the third largest contributor Whereas in BAC, the third largest contributor was on-campus ICT or energy use We'll look in greater detail at student travel As you saw from the previous slide, student travel was the number one contributor to emissions of the BAC students or the face-to-face students And the number three contributor amongst the distance or blended students from Bokodal If we take a look at the graph here, we can see that the Bokodal students have significantly less kilometers traveled And therefore significantly less CO2 from travel compared to the BAC students The travel emissions were calculated by multiplying the total program-related distance traveled by the learner each semester This was basically the number of trips multiplied by the round-trip kilometer estimate Multiplied by the vehicle emissions factor While the Bokodal students were more likely than their BAC counterparts to use a car as their main mode of transportation They had significantly less program-related travel each semester The greater overall distance traveled by the BAC students Contributes to their higher CO2 emissions for travel each semester as compared to the Bokodal students In terms of the emissions generated from on-campus energy use We found that the BAC group had significantly higher on-campus emissions than the Bokodal group This result is to be expected as the BAC group spends significantly more time on campus than the Bokodal group Which only attends the campus sessions for contact classes a few times each semester As you may recall from the initial results table the number one contributor to overall emissions of the Bokodal students was ICT purchased However, we still found that the BAC students on average had higher carbon emissions from ICT purchased This was due to the significantly higher proportion of BAC students who had purchased a laptop specifically for their program as compared to the Bokodal group as mentioned in our literature review one of the gaps that we found was that there was little information about the potential impact of demographic factors on learner emissions While demographic factors have been assessed in terms of general individual carbon emissions, there wasn't much information on how these factors might impact learner's emissions Could the different profiles of ODL learners and face-to-face learners impact on their emissions? Can we control for these variables to isolate the impact of motive delivery on learner emissions specifically? In order to control for other possible determining demographic factors A regression analysis on the dependent variable of overall learner carbon emissions was run The independent variables included in the model were age, sex, institution and parental university education These variables were selected based on existing research and studies The result of the regression showed that regardless of demographic factors blended learning reduces the carbon emissions of learners The regression results table is presented here As you can see the model accounts for approximately 52 percent of the variation in carbon footprint An institution emerges as the only significant independent determinant of learner carbon emissions even when controlling for age, sex and parental university education Being a bulkadol learner results in a predicted decrease in emissions of approximately 435 kilograms a semester Further supporting the contention that motive delivery is a major factor in students learning related in carbon emissions While a more robust analysis including other possible predictors would help strengthen this hypothesis The present model suggests that motive delivery has an impact on learning relating carbon emissions even when considering demographic factors Based on these findings, there are implications, considerations and recommendations for higher education institutes that are concerned with sustainability and and reducing learner emissions From our research, which supports previous findings We see that emissions from travel are by far the greatest contributor to the overall carbon emissions for face-to-face learners such as for BAC In light of this institution should look for ways to reduce travel One such way, of course, is to consider the mode of delivery In our study, the comparison of learner carbon emissions data from both face-to-face and cd-based students in Botswana Revealed that the average learning related carbon footprint of the face-to-face group Was nearly three times greater than that of the odl group and the difference was statistically significant Another way that Institutions can reduce travel Is through incentivizing greener modes of transport such as through Biking walking and perhaps providing incentives for public transportation Other research also shows that investments in on-campus or near-campus housing can cut down student commutes And thereby reduce overall student generated carbon emissions So this is another option that institutions can look at in order to decrease learner emissions There are also areas for further research Well, the findings of the study support the conclusions of similar studies comparing the carbon emissions of learners under different modes of delivery in the uk and north america Additional comparative studies of odl and face-to-face programs in developing countries can further strengthen these findings Such studies could be replicated in diverse development contexts and locations to test the generalizability of the findings As well We have seen from the research that odl or blended modes can decrease emissions by reducing face-to-face contact hours and even learner travel however Further research and analysis on types of odl such as blended online cd-based or print based Odl is required to understand which of these has the lowest learner related carbon emissions So we've looked at how open and distance learning can reduce learner emissions within this study However, how can the results of the study be used to promote open and distance learning? While odl is often marketed to prospective students on the basis of its flexibility and ease of access It is rarely positioned as an environmentally sustainable option Higher education institutions should consider marketing odl courses from a sustainability angle to attract students and increase their satisfaction Moreover these findings can be promoted by institutions to improve faculty acceptance of odl Which remains a major challenge for many institutions looking to mainstream open and distance learning delivery modes Highlighting the environmental benefits of odl could go a long way in promoting its expansion and uptake Particularly in conjunction with advocacy efforts to address perceptions of quality To conclude the findings of the study suggests that the carbon reduction efforts of higher education institutions Should have a greater focus on pedagogical design not just infrastructural improvements or campus greening As sustainability becomes a more important goal for heis around the world Institutions should consider how open and distance learning modes of delivery can be upscaled Not only to increase access, but also to reduce the environmental impact of education We want to take this opportunity to thank our co-authors and contributors in this paper. Dr. Stanley Modesto of Botswana Open University Dr. K. Balasubramanian and Mr. John Lesbrans We'd also like to thank the participating organizations Botswana Accountancy College and Botswana Open University, formerly Bocadol If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. Our information can be found at www.col.org And a final thank you to the organizers of the international symposium on climate change and the role of education