Promoting the Sustainability Development Goals in and out of the classroom.
The Big Benchmarking Tool was created to help universities analyze the amount of sustainability being taught in the curriculum and researched by faculty.
It was created by students from the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in collaboration with the University of Worcester and Kingston University.
The tool consists of two parts, the Curriculum Tool and the Research Tool.
The Curriculum Tool examines the amount of sustainability taught in the available modules and how many students are taking those courses in the formal section of the tool.
It also evaluates the amount of sustainability that students are interacting with through events and other organizations in the informal section of the tool.
The Research Tool analyzes the amount of research being done on sustainability-related topics in the formal section of the tool.
It also looks at what incentives and policies are in place to increase research on sustainability in the informal portion of the tool.
Any or all of these sections of the tool can be completed at any time. The tool allows universities to track their progress on any single question and questions can be skipped if a university feels they are not relevant to their efforts.
Our original set of keywords came from the past IQP: Critiquing and Developing Benchmarking Tools for Sustainability. These keywords are summarized from The United Nations, General Assembly, “Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The next IQP, Implementing and Critiquing the Higher-Ed. Sustainability Evaluation Tool, took this keyword list and applied it to searching for sustainability related modules. After initially running the module database software they received a result of 10.8 % sustainability related modules. After completing a validity analysis of 20% of the flagged modules and 5% of non flagged modules and found 21.47% false positives and 10.71% false negatives. Taking these percentages into consideration the actual amount of sustainability related modules was calculated to be 16.57%.
We expanded upon the original set of keywords to include 322 key words/phrases. We found most of these keywords on The Compiled Keywords for SDG Mapping The Compiled Keywords for SDG Mapping. A list of sustainability related keywords compiled by Australian Universities. As well as adding keywords we removed some keywords from the original list that were found to produce too many false positives. After adding the new list to our module analyzing software we found that 15.48% of modules at the University of Worcester were sustainability related, which was similar to the final percentage the past IQP had estimated. This similarity to the calculated actual sustainability module percentage showed that the keyword list is accurate to sustainability terminology used in module descriptions.