How online classrooms can boost sustainability education

The development of virtual global classrooms is helping universities and colleges to boost education for sustainable development (ESD) by teaching students who otherwise would not have access to higher education and by facilitating interactions that prompt the invention of global solutions to sustainability challenges.

“I love it when I am teaching online,” said Debra Rowe, president of the US Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development, who has been teaching remotely for more than 30 years. “Students can learn so much from each other and immediately apply what they are learning.”

The diversity helps to boost innovation, with research finding that “you learn more when you can elaborate and come up with examples”, she said.

Rowe said such interactions help to fight a dangerous and growing political narrative that the world’s resources are scarce and that “the other” is someone to be feared or hated.

“In reality, we have the resources to give everybody on this planet a higher quality of life, while still protecting the planet for present and future generations,” she said.



More inclusive

Virtual classrooms can be more inclusive, with role models, mentors and experts more easily participating in such classes than in-person sessions. Since everyone sees each other, Rowe told University World News, it is easier to create interactive discussions, where students acknowledge each other.

Rowe argued that “the teacher should not be the sage on the stage”, but instead “the facilitating guide on the side, helping students to have those moments of transformational learning where they understand what is going on and what they are capable of”, how to relate the content to their personal lives and how they can contribute to a better society.

In well facilitated virtual classrooms, she said, students also learn skills to build communities, besides interpersonal communication, and how to consider others’ perspectives and be curious about them.

Duncan Ross, a leading member of the United Nations-supported Higher Education Sustainability Initiative (HESI), also sees potential for inclusion in online classrooms.

To him, international higher education brings people together from different backgrounds, opening them up to diverse cultures “in a way that they simply won’t be in their normal life”. This, said Ross, is especially important when the world deals with “so many global tensions between countries, often artificial”.

Virtual studies are valuable, especially given that international physical interactions are always going to be something that is limited in scope since “not every student can afford to go to the other side of the world for six months” and “we do not want to be flying people all over the world frequently”, given the environmental footprint of such travel.

Limitations to online interactions

That said, Ross accepted there were also built-in limitations with online interactions. “The work that can be done and the experiences that can be had if you are in a country are far, far stronger than those that can be had virtually,” he said.

He gave as an example India’s private multi-campus Amrita University, which “insists that for their students to graduate, they need to spend time in their living labs working with communities in disadvantaged parts of India”, experiencing the country’s many languages and cultures.

While “there is a bunch of things that you can absolutely learn through” virtual classrooms, sometimes they do not allow work usually done in-person, said Ross, giving the example of lab work. “The virtual classroom cannot replicate the stickiness of microbiology, and it cannot teach you the techniques you need to know”, so “you do not understand things in the same way”.

Therefore, he suggested a balance, since higher education is not just lectures and lab work. “The virtual classroom is another of those things that we bring into the mix that makes higher education the amazing thing that it is.”

The Times Higher Education has noted that there is as yet “no global agreement on the definition of online learning” nor how to measure its quality.

Therefore, when it released its Online Learning Rankings for the first time in 2024, it awarded gold recommendations to 11 universities across four continents: three from the United States, two from the United Kingdom, two from India and one each from Russia, Hungary, New Zealand and Australia. In doing so, it considered different scores, instead of ranking universities.

Among the universities receiving gold, New Zealand’s Massey University achieved the highest scores for both engagement and environment, which tracks inclusion, diversity and support levels.

Impact of distance education in India

Distance learning plays a direct role in an emerging market country like India, which has the world’s largest population of 1.4 billion. With more than 40% of its citizens still under the age of 25, according to India’s ministry of statistics and programme implementation, the importance of virtual classrooms cannot be overstated.

“The growth in the infrastructure for face-to-face instruction is unable to match the educational demands of the ever-increasing number of aspiring students,” said a note from the University Grants Commission (UGC), which governs India’s higher education.

At present nearly 25% of higher education students in India undertake open and distance learning studies, it said, which is critically important in promoting sustainable development in a country whose GDP per head is just US$2,380, but growing fast.

In all, there are about 250 open and distance learning organisations across India, including central and state government-supported universities and colleges and private or standalone institutions, said the UGC note.

In 2022, the University of Delhi established a Department of Distance and Continuing Education offering programmes in several fields including environmental science, business management, economics and psychology. A university note stressed that course material is supplemented with video lectures and academic counselling at learning support centres.

Indeed, video lectures are immensely popular among students, Professor Ciza Thomas, vice-chancellor of the new Kerala University of Digital Sciences, Innovation and Technology in southern India, told University World News.

“For students, learning should happen anywhere and anytime. The present generation wants flexibility, and it is so tech savvy that if you go totally digital, they would be very happy,” she said.

However, faculty at Kerala University feel that face-to-face interaction is important to hold students’ attention, said Thomas. In her experience, virtual classrooms “demotivate” the instructors.

To overcome the attention retention problem in virtual classrooms, teachers have been persuaded to use AI enabled tools, such as Quizizz, said Thomas. “It pops up questions on students’ monitors, which could be an exercise, some case study or something related to the topic,” she said. “In the end the dashboard displays individual scores for everyone to see,” she said.

According to a University of Hyderabad memorandum, distance education can lower higher education’s carbon footprint by reducing the need for physical classrooms and travel.

However, some Indian educationalists warn about taking a narrow equipment-focused approach to sustainability through education.

“The wider issue of unsustainability is not due to the air conditioning, refrigerators or fuel-emitting vehicles” at universities, Manisha Priyam, a professor at the National University for Education Planning and Administration in New Delhi, told University World News.

Rather, sustainable development in education needs wider investment that brings information and sustainable change to the broader community. Said Priyam: “We have created universities as a highly urban elite commodity,” she said. “They need to be community resources and linked to people in remote and rural areas.”

Open learning platforms

The United Kingdom’s Open University (OU), a long established remote-learning institution, has taken this increased educational access sustainability goal a step further by offering a free learning platform, accessible worldwide.

Dr Julia Cooke, associate dean for external engagement and enterprise in the OU’s faculty of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), told University World News that its OpenLearn platform, combined with its paid-for standard courses, serves students in “180 countries, a global community that is truly diverse”.

Her STEM faculty also runs virtual laboratories, the OpenSTEM Labs, a suite of online laboratories that allow students from anywhere in the world to participate in experimental work 24/7 as if they were in the laboratory, said Cooke.

Founded in 2013, these multi-award-winning labs make practical experiments accessible for scientists and engineers, delivering authentic laboratory experiences online and at scale.

Each year the OpenSTEM Labs support more than 100,000 hours of student learning, helping the OU to address STEM skills shortages, and including thousands of external non-OU enrolled users, from school children to PhD researchers. More than 10,000 new users register each year to access over 160 different practical activities, said Cooke.

Meanwhile, the Weston Open Living Lab is a new initiative launched in 2022, which includes three sites on the Open University physical campus in Milton Keynes, southern England, which includes a floodplain meadow, a floodplain woodland and an urban woodland fitted with sensors collecting environmental data for student study, said Cooke.

Extended reality

Another sustainability-focused initiative is from the Warwick Business School (WBS), at the UK’s University of Warwick, which is using SmartStage technology to conduct virtual events and classes, reducing the need for travel and its associated environmental footprint, Dan Pearson, WBS director of the academic environment, told University World News.

The SmartStage technology is an immersive and interactive advanced extended reality (XR) platform. Unlike traditional green screen setups, it uses LED video walls to display content, allowing presenters and audiences to see and interact with the digital surroundings in real-time. “This enhances the user experience by making the environment more engaging and intuitive,” said Pearson.

Fewer physical resources are needed for events and classes as a result, he said, making education more accessible. “Students only need an internet connection to access high-quality education,” which reduces overall learning costs, he said.

Collaborative learning

Other initiatives have involved linking universities involved in promoting sustainability in virtual learning using collaborative online international learning or COIL, which connects students and academics in different countries.

Noting, however, that the use of this technology in higher education to promote a sustainable agenda “has been scarce”, in 2023, researchers from Mexico and Colombia published the results of four-week-long global courses held between groups from the Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico (Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey) and the Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios in Colombia, in which students dealt with management of natural resources, climate change and biomimetics.

According to the researchers, “students were able to develop sustainability competencies and skills to communicate effectively through online interaction with people from different cultures and disciplines, showing pride in their national identity and respect for the richness and characteristics of other cultures and the use of technological tools that facilitate communication and distance learning in multicultural virtual environments”.

They added: “Students indeed appreciated that the conceptualisation of sustainability could give a better perspective for the professional questions they will face in the future.” Therefore, they concluded that COIL strategies, such as global classrooms, “are essential to developing sustainability competencies globally”.

Equipping lecturers to teach online

Rowe warned that although there are a lot of individuals “who are great” at teaching online, a lot of educators hate it. Therefore, she identified as a key challenge a lack of higher education professional development requirements for lecturers to improve their online skills.

There are centres for teaching and learning at a lot of universities, but their services are optional, she said, recommending that higher education institutions require professors to “learn how to be effective with online teaching”, and also to be literate about societal issues and the SDGs, “so that whatever they are teaching will stay more relevant”.

They should also be taught to build solutions with students rather than “doom and gloom” them, which is “causing mental health problems, apathy and frustration for young people”, Rowe stressed.

To her, universities should also require educators to give their students real-world problem-solving projects that see students interact with the community and “practice their skills of being a change maker”, because “everybody can support those sustainability key competencies and build them into their curricula”.

These competencies would also help students in their careers because employers value them, added Rowe. Furthermore, she said, universities should provide “very specific training in how to fully utilise online opportunities to build a more inclusive and better education for everybody”.