July 2-4, 2019 – Dr. Lara Khabbaz, Director of the Office of Marketing, and Dr. Sophia Ghanimeh Associate Professor at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering-Faculty of Engineering, at Notre Dame University-Louaize (NDU) put forward an Online Open Course project titled “Integrating Sustainability in Educational Institutions” to the Open Education Design Workshop as part of the Open Education for a Better World (OE4BW) program.
The OE4BW program is a joint venture by the University of Nova Gorica (UNG), and the UNESCO Chair on Open Technologies for OER and Open Learning at the Jožef Stefan Institute (JSI). The goal is to provide basic knowledge about open education concepts, and pedagogical, didactic, and content related issues in open education through the support of international mentors/experts from all over the world. It inspired and encouraged participants/facilitators to reach a wider audience and design future projects in the form of Online Open Courses.
A call for projects from around the world is published each year in the fall (October-November), with proposals selected based on their compatibility with the SDGs, social impact, the maturity of the idea, and the capacity and commitment of the creators to see the project through. The chosen project creators are then appointed a mentor with whom they collaborate to bring it to fruition.
Igor Lesko, Director of Operations of the Open Education Consortium, and Prof. Pedro Mendoza-Arana from Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Lima - Peru, supervised the course design and implementation.
Dr. Fawzi Baroud, Assistant VP for IT, was the local mentor and presenter of Dr. Khabbaz and Dr. Ghanimeh’s project in Vipava, Slovenia in addition to being the mentor of Dr. Sandeep Patil, Assistant Professor at the Azad College of Education, Satara (Maharashtra), and India for his project “Evolving as a Facilitative Teacher for Sustainable Development”.
“Integrating Sustainability in Educational Institutions,” is an online open course that targets small Educational institutions of 10,000 students or fewer. It describes the process of embracing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and uses NDU as a case study to cover all of the SDGs. It merges key elements of managerial structure, implementation strategy and process pilot testing, with the aim of training the different constituents of educational institutions (students, educators and staff members) on managing sustainability and integrating SDGs in the institutional culture. The course describes the framework components and accelerators that are expected to boost efficiency, engagement, value creation, innovation, and entrepreneurial spirit.