(116b) Teaching Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment Via Online Course

The concept of sustainability cannot be easily understood because we have been educated through a traditional reductionist approach to learning and research. Whereas the notion of sustainability science requires us to transcend disciplinary boundaries by using integrative, interdisciplinary, holistic and system perspective approaches, university curricula have been developed where teaching and learning has been operating within a silo. Unless we are able to think “Outside/Beyond the box”, as Albert Einstein articulated in resolving our problems, we cannot effectively impart the idea of sustainability to the next generation of scholars, engineers, scientists, economists and policy makers.

The aim of this work at the University of Maine is to integrate life cycle and integrative thinking into university curriculum.  It intends to educate students through a course dedicated solely to sustainability science and find out the most effective method to teach the principles of industrial ecology (IE) and life cycle assessment (LCA).  A new interdisciplinary course in IE and LCA has been offered to senior undergraduate and graduate students in engineering, forestry, natural science, agriculture, business administration, economics, human ecology and resource management. The developmental perspective of this course is to transcend disciplinary boundaries by accounting the different backgrounds of students as well as their different levels of interests and passion. We found that the best way to teach environmental sustainability is project-based and by encouraging students to make use of comprehensive online course materials in learning sustainability assessment. A Blackboard 9.1 Online Learning for Life Cycle Sustainability has been developed to complement students’ learning by having direct access to course materials including LCA course handouts, exercises, assignments, readings, journal articles; key publicly available data, inventory and Weblinks; impact factor information; academic software tools and models for LCA implementation; and tutorial manuals for software and modeling tools. Students have direct links to relevant YouTube and personally recorded audios/ videos; sample LCA reports, checklists and templates; and many others.

The primary benefits and impacts on students are: through case studies and exercises, students have been encouraged to think beyond disciplinary boundaries; and to use systems perspective/integrative thinking approaches. This project has demonstrated the increasing need to incorporate life cycle and transdisciplinary thinking across the university curriculum.