BtheChange: Innovative Higher Education for Environmental Sustainability

Higher education, in particular, has a fundamental role to play in this effort to address climate change. Yet, there is a need to improve the quality of higher education through innovative pedagogies, in order to be able to address the issue of climate change, on which there are limited effective educational programmes.

A multifold challenge

The challenge is multifold: practices should step beyond the delivery of information, and induce understanding and behaviour change on vital issues.

This is specifically pertinent in the effort to promote environmental responsibilities in students. Educators need to consider and design their curricula based on students’ individual differences (e.g., demographics, values, beliefs) to design effective educational courses.

Digital transformation of learning has revealed the possible use of video education in designing appealing, accessible and inclusive courses, although no work has addressed the matching of video educational features to user characteristics and needs.

Research findings show that people with the highest degrees of scientific literacy were not the most concerned about climate change. In addition, climate change education focused primarily on the depth and conclusiveness of scientific evidence may not be effective.

Therefore, developing a successful educational programme for climate change is a challenging endeavour, yet an important one that needs to be addressed, given the urgency of the problem. We aim to design an engaging digital educational programme taking into consideration individual differences and aiming to promote awareness, reflective thinking and pro-environmental behaviour.

Goal: to create an engaging education

Our BtheChange project will involve the development of an educational platform powered by automated analytics for the selection of audio-visual educational content according to user characteristics supported by effective learning activities to elicit increases in knowledge and changes in attitudes, beliefs and behaviours.

BtheChange is aligned with the priorities of the Erasmus+ call and of leading institutions such as WHO and the UN, highlighting the need to develop educational programmes contributing to the solution of the problem of climate change.

According to UNESCO, “Education is crucial to promote climate action. It helps people understand and address the impacts of the climate crisis, empowering them with the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes needed to act as agents of change”.

The project engages technological, educational and psychological innovative educational methods to develop a digital Individualized Education Programme resulting in a flexible, engaging, and impactful education on one of the most pertinent global challenges.