Environmental Justice Institute (on its own account) E-lecture on "Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development" In the upcoming German winter term (October 15 to March 30, teaching time until February 12), the Environmental Justice Institute (EJI) offers its second
e-lecture, this time kindly hosted by the
Philips Universität Marburg. The first e-lecture on
"Climate Change and Climate Justice" in the last semester was generally well
received by participating students and guest lectures alike building the base of the continuation by now. For the ongoing semester, the EJI offers the possibility to students from all universities in the world as well as externals to register for the course (until October 21, 2016). This attempt assists our approach to open Environmental Justice Institute's e-lectures hosted by listed universities with benefit for every site. By this win-win-win situation students get the chance to dig into the field assisted by experts and more, the academic community benefits from increased exchange within and further development of didectics in teaching (for more detail click here), and the EJI benefits from strengthening Environmental Justice Research discourses on the broadest scale. Technical issues and administrative obstacles have been identified during the pilot in the last semester, reviewing via student feedback as part of the teaching evaluation. As for technical issues, the process has been optimized and infrastructure improved. One basic problem is the audio/video connection, in particular to areas with weak broadband. In the current course, skype will be used complementary to deal with this issue if it occurs. The main administrative obstacle has been that individuals from educational institutions outside of the hosting university could not register easily as a contract between the EJI and the universities could not be closed based on due to different lecture periods in different countries and different faculty deadlines for offering courses in upcoming semesters. Now, the EJI offers the opportunity to register individually for the course by paying a small tuition fee in advance (see below). What is e-lecturing and how does it work? Based on experiences in the industry - in particular the concept of blended learning, the idea was to apply a unique feature of new media tools to foster location neutral (standortneutrale) lecturing: synchronous virtual classroom (VC) teaching. This basically works like a "regular" seminar but is conducted in the virtual space by means of the software "Adobe Connect". Students are logging in weekly and "meet" the tutor in the VC. While all students are muted by default, pressenters or the tutor can give speaker rights to the students any time. Students can use a wide range of "signals" (such as applause, agree, disagree) to give feedback but first of all they can "raise hand" to demand speaking rights if they want to say something like answering / asking a question or contributing to the debate. Visual contact to the tutor is provided by video connection at all time. The usage of Powerpoint, whiteboards, and group rooms lists only some of the features provided by Adobe Connect. Bringing together students from different, international countries BTW universities and inviting experts to guest lectures from abroad are the undeniable benefits of e-lecturing for the didactic development of academic teaching. It herewith contributes also to the goal of sustainable learning and sustainable production of knowledge What are the gains for participants? Beside acquiring knowledge in the field of Sustainable Development and Environmental Justice in the provided international and interdisciplinary environment of experts, successful participants (find the Course requirements for successful participation here) will receive:
If you need assistance, please do not hesitate to contact the e-learning team. What is the course on "Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development" about? This course will analyse the environmental problem set by looking at two concepts Sustainable Development and Environmental Justice. Both concepts will be discussed as part of their socio-historical emergence as well as in their relevance for policy making. We are going to look at the discourses of both as well as at the policy frames in which these are settled. The sessions will deal with topics like the historical clustering of environmental movement, development theories (modernization, world system, dependency, globalization) and the four world-views on environmental change, the history of nature and society relations, mapping sustainable development discourses, theories of justice (Rawls and Schmidtz), Environmental Justice (Research), Environmental Racism, intersectionalism, and case studies. Expert guest lecturers will be invited to give a talk. Read full description here. Tuition fee The tuition fee for the whole course is 50,- € due two weeks after registration. There are three different groups of participants:
If you are interested to know more about the course, just follow this link and if you want to register, please click here. |  Image: © Rawpixel.com |
