The RUCAS Toolkit httpICTeEf://www.rucastoolkit.edc.uoc.gr/
The great challenge of the 21st century for institutions of higher learning is to educate students to be able to transform themselves and society towards a more sustainable future. Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is seen as a vision of education that seeks to empower people to assume responsibility and co-responsibility of their actions for creating a sustainable future. These challenges call that university curricula and teaching methods should be re-oriented in order to infuse ESD and sensitize students and other stakeholders towards sustainable development. Reorienting existing higher education curricula to address sustainable development is very urgent and necessary to equip graduates with knowledge, skills, perspectives and values of sustainability. The RUCAS Tempus Project has initiated a wide range of activities to develop resources, revise and develop new curriculum initiatives, build capacity amongst university staff, develop appropriate infrastructure, and strengthen national and regional institutional networks. Curriculum review and revision has been carried out in the disciplines of Educational Sciences, Social Sciences, Economics/business Sciences, Health Sciences, Engineering and Applied Sciences. The RUCAS on-line Toolkit consisted of eight modules has been created to help faculty members learn the basics of the processes and practices for re-orienting university curricula to address sustainability.
The ICTeEfS Toolkit for Curriculum Design & Development
The ICTeEfS Toolkit aims to help educators infuse sustainability issues in their courses enabled by ICTs. It consists of parts dealing with sustainability challenges, inter/cross-disciplinarity, contextualization ICTs with education for sustainability and vice versa, active citizenship and civic engagement, participatory curriculum design, course revision and reconstruction to address sustainability issues.
ICTeEfS SWOT Analysis Toolkit
SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats and provides a framework for organizations to identify strengths, mitigate weaknesses, seize opportunities, and avoid threats. Strengths and Weaknesses are internal SWOT factors while Opportunities and Threats are external SWOT factors. The ICTeEfS SWOT Analysis Toolkit generates information that is helpful in identifying and assessing needs and capacities to perform certain activities and/or reach defined goals and objectives. It can also help to explore new opportunities and risks, make strategic decisions and prepare action plans. It is being used by academic instructors, faculty and university administration, student representatives as well as representatives from external stakeholders. Applying a participatory approach representing internal and external stakeholders is more likely to come up with fruitful and meaningful data, while it also signals that community members should be part of the process. In other words, the best SWOT results come when the process is representative, collaborative and inclusive.