Concordia University
AC-1: Academic Courses

(See URL indicated below)

The sustainability courses inventory is made of two parts: 1. Undergraduate courses: The inventory was made through the Sustainable Curriculum Project and based on the curriculum inventory methodology devised by AASHE's STARS® sustainability tracking system. Full methodology is found in the URL above. 2. Graduate courses: The inventory was made by Concordia's Sustainability Analyst using a list of 38 keywords related to sustainability. Full methodology is found in the Notes section below.

- Methodology for identifying graduate courses related to sustainability In contrast with the inventory of undergraduate sustainability courses (realized as part of the Sustainable Curriculum Project), the identification of graduate sustainability courses was done using the simplified method described below. 1. As graduate courses are often designed for research graduates in mind, some courses cannot be related to sustainability either because they are not related to any specific topic (e.g. practicum) or because the topic varies by the nature of the course itself (e.g. special topic courses). As such, the following types of courses were not included in the inventory: a. Thesis presentation courses (topic cannot be imposed) b. Seminar courses (topic always change) c. Special topic courses (topic always change) d. Practicum courses (not topic related) e. Internship/stage credits (topic cannot be imposed) f. Examination/Exam credits (not topic related) g. Non-credit courses (usually part of requirements external to academic programs) h. Fieldwork (not topic related) i. Essay courses (topic cannot be imposed) j. Directed study courses (topics always change) k. Research paper courses (topic cannot be imposed) l. Methodology courses (not topic related) 2. Courses have been filtered based on their title and their courses description using an excluding process and a list of keywords. a. When a course’s title and description did NOT include a single keyword from the list (detected as NEGATIVE), the course was considered not to be related to sustainability and was not further reviewed. b. When a course’s title and description included one keyword or more from the list (detected as POSITIVE), a review of the course description was done to avoid False Positive results. c. Courses detected as neither NEGATIVE nor False Positive were included in the final inventory of sustainability-related courses. d. For graduate courses only, no distinction was done between sustainability-focused and sustainability-related courses. All included courses are considered “sustainability-related”. 3. The list of keywords was created with an excluding process mindset. If none of the keywords are present in neither the course’s title nor the course’s description, it is safely assumed that the course is not related to sustainability. Based on some keywords of the Sustainable Curriculum Project and discussions with sustainability staff at the University, the following 38 keywords were used to exclude courses if none of these were present: - aboriginal - carbon - climate - communit (to detect “community”, “communities”) - conservation - social responsibility (to detect “social responsibility”, “social responsibilities”) - democra (to detect “democracy”, “democratic”) - diversity - drought - ecolog (to detect “ecology”, “ecological”) - ecosystem - eco-system - energ (to detect “energy”, “energies”) - environment (to detect “environment”, “environmental”, “environmentally”) - equality - equit (to detect “equity”, “equitable”) - flood - food - global - indigen (to detect “indigenous”, “indigene”) - intergenerational - inter-generational - pollut (to detect “pollution”, “polluting”) - resilien (to detect “resilience”, “resiliency”, “resilient”) - resource - scarce - scarcity - sustainab (to detect “sustainable”, “sustainability”) - system thinking - systems thinking - triple bottom line - urban agriculture - waste - water