Colorado State University
AC-1: Academic Courses

Our methodology approach was taken directly from the STARS 2.1 technical manual. For our 2017 STARS report, we developed a database with sustainability courses and worked with the Provost to ask each Department Chair on campus to review the courses to edit descriptions, remove courses that were not being offered and/or did not meet the criteria, and add courses that may have been missed during the course catalog inventory. For 2018-2019, we used that same database and added any new courses from the 2018-2019 course catalog that include sustainability and deleted courses that are no longer offered. Department Chair and faculty have ongoing access to the database to add, delete, and edit courses as needed. The final course inventory is attached along with our methodology. Sustainability courses are indicated in our inventory and have a primary and explicit focus on sustainability. Courses that include sustainability are indicated in our inventory, as well as courses that have a primary focus other than sustainability but incorporate or integrate sustainability challenges, activities, service-learning, research, and/or case studies. As a land grant institution, many of these courses offer field experience and/or hands-on research or laboratory learning opportunities.

We counted each course that was offered for the 2018-2019 academic year just once and did not factor in courses that have multiple sections or offered multiple times each academic year.

The copy of unique courses does not include the following courses: - Internships - Practicums - Thesis - Dissertation - Just ‘Seminar’ - Just ‘Capstone’ - Field Placements - Group Studies - Just ‘Research’ These were not included in the inventory because these courses do not offer a course description as they vary by semester/student.