Month: March 2020

Posted on

Next up: A Student Survey!

 Amidst the slight change of plans brought on by the global COVID-19 pandemic, we have been working on a student survey with plans to launch it in April. Having an idea of what students think of sustainability and sustainability education is very important to us.  

Once the survey goes live, students will be invited to fill out the classic e-lomake survey – we’ll announce things over e-mail, in Flamma and through social media channels. And here on the blog, of course. So stay tuned!

The UN Sustainable Development Goals are underpinned by the notion of inclusion, so it wouldn’t be great if we didn’t at least try to include students in the course development process. That’s exactly what we’re aiming for with the survey – we want to know what the students think so we can drive our course development based on their experiences.  However, the survey won’t be the last chance for students to get involved – more on this later!

 

 Photo by Sofia Lavaste 

Posted on

Some changes

Things don’t always go the way you plan them. Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and the consequent actions taken by the Finnish government, we will suspend our plans for hosting campus workshops, at least for the time being.

So instead, we will do remote workshops for everyone who wants to participate, likely in late April. We also want to encourage any interested parties to join our course planning Teams area. Joining is easy – just drop a line to uhsustained-team@helsinki.fi and one of our team members will add you.

Things are not entirely clear as of right now, and we will do a trial run of the workshop before official invitations go out. For now, we hope you take care of yourself and those at risk.

 

All the best,

Course coordinator team

Photo by Sofia Lavaste

Posted on

What’s next?

 

Photo by Sofia Lavaste (@slavaste on Instagram)

The course development process has been kicked off with a plenty of meetings across campuses and faculties. In reality though, the process started much earlier – for example, last fall, a HELSUS trainee wrote a comprehensive report on all sustainability-related courses organised globally. This has given us an idea how multidisciplinary courses on sustainability have been organised in other universities.

The next formal step for us is to introduce the project to the Council of Education Affairs (ONE) at the university and hear their thoughts. Before that, however, the coordination team is conducting a student survey to hear thoughts from university students (we’ll tell you all about this in an upcoming post).

In addition to the more formal avenues in the development process, we will also launch workshops for enthusiastic university staff. These will be both online and in person across campuses.

If you want to know more, contact us at uhsustained-team@helsinki.fi ! You can also subscribe to our mailing list, or join our Teams-area. For both, you can contact the team above and we’ll get you sorted!

 

Posted on

A sustainability course for all UH students

University of Helsinki is planning its own multidisciplinary sustainability course for students of all faculties. The development process will be led by university teacher Rami Ratvio. The project stems from a need to ensure graduates of the university have the skills and knowledge to deal with sustainability challenges of today and tomorrow.

Ratvio invites all university staff and students to join in on the development process. “I appreciate the work faculties, programmes and student organizations have already done on sustainability. I would be happy to acquaint myself with the ongoing sustainability projects” Ratvio says.

The development process will be kicked off with collaborative online workshops.

The course development is carried out by the Centre for University Teaching and Learning and Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science.

For additional information, contact Rami Ratvio at rami.ratvio[at]helsinki.fi