This paper describes a project to explore the possibilities of virtual worlds in educating Green IT. In the project a virtual world has been created with various assignments which are meant to create awareness on sustainability aspects of IT. The world (and the assignments) will be incorporated in a course for first-year IT students. In order to measure the effects of the course, a questionnaire has been developed which can be used before and after the course to measure the attitude towards green IT.
Buildings need to be carefully operated and maintained for optimum health, comfort, energy performance, and utility costs. The increasing use of Machine Learning combined with Big Data in the building services sector has shown the potential to bring energy efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Therefore, upskilling and reskilling the current workforce is required to realize new possibilities. In addition, sharing and preserving knowledge are also required for the sustainable growth of professionals and companies. This formed the basis for the Dutch Research Council funded TransAct project. To increase access to education on the job, online learning is experiencing phenomenal growth. A study was conducted with two focus groups - professionals of a building service company and university researchers - to understand the existing challenges and the ways to improve knowledge sharing and upskilling through learning on the job. This study introduced an Enterprise Social Network platform that connects members and may facilitate knowledge sharing. As a community forum, Yammer from office 365 was used. For hosting project files, a SharePoint page was created. For online courses, the company’s online learning site was utilized. The log data from the online tools were analysed, semi-structured interviews and webinars were conducted and feedback was collected with google forms. Incentive models like social recognition and innovative project results were used to motivate the professionals for online activities. This paper distinguishes the impacts of initiatives on the behaviour of university researchers vs company employees.
In November 2019, scholars and practitioners from ten higher education institutions celebrated the launch of the iKudu project. This project, co-funded by Erasmus [1], focuses on capacity development for curriculum transformation through internationalisation and development of Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) virtual exchange. Detailed plans for 2020 were discussed including a series of site visits and face-to-face training. However, the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the plans in ways that could not have been foreseen and new ways of thinking and doing came to the fore. Writing from an insider perspective as project partners, in this paper we draw from appreciative inquiry, using a metaphor of a mosaic as our identity, to first provide the background on the iKudu project before sharing the impact of the pandemic on the project’s adapted approach. We then discuss how alongside the focus of iKudu in the delivery of an internationalised and transformed curriculum using COIL, we have, by our very approach as project partners, adopted the principles of COIL exchange. A positive impact of the pandemic was that COIL offered a consciousness raising activity, which we suggest could be used more broadly in order to help academics think about international research practice partnerships, and, as in our situation, how internationalised and decolonised curriculum practices might be approached. 1. KA2 Erasmus+ Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices (capacity building in the field of Higher Education)
