Explore the key governance challenges for smart sustainable city (SSC) initiatives and the approach required. Learn to organize co-creation and to use a roadmap that support planning, implementation, close monitoring and risks mitigation.

Urban planners, policy makers and managers have an important role in making cities and communities more sustainable and resilient by incentivizing and developing smart solutions. Medellín in Colombia is a good example of how effective governance and cooperation with citizens led to the remake of the city and transformed it to a safer environment with a thriving economy. But how can those initiatives be sustained and governed? How can we deal with the challenges along the way, like effective stakeholders’ engagement, conflicting interests, decision-making under deep uncertainty, interdependent problems, spatial justice, and the transformation towards a digital society? To sum it up: building smart sustainable cities initiatives requires a strong governance capacity and new approaches!

This course will:

- provide the principles for incentivising, planning, developing and managing sustainable smart city initiatives
- present an overview of the drivers and barriers for SSC development
- present sustainability challenges and tools for SSC development
- show practical recommendations to strengthen SSC governance capacity
- introduce a smart city governance roadmap
- explain the conditions for effective stakeholder engagement and ways to organize co-creation pathways
- clarify the regulatory and legal framework for SSC including privacy and cybersecurity issues
- describe the conditions to implement digital innovation that benefit citizens including data governance
- show the importance of close monitoring and assessing SSC projects including data reliability and algorithms
- equip you with knowledge and learnings from case studies from various projects that were carried out in Latin America, next to familiarizing you with common challenges that arise in the process. These cases range from urban transportation to participatory budgeting, safety and waste management applications, but always making the connection with the governance and sustainability aspects.

The course will be moderated in English, Spanish and Portuguese.

This MOOC is a spin-off of the EU-funded Cap4City project.

This course has been developed, and will be delivered by experts in the field of Smart Sustainable Cities from twelve different universities in Latin America and Europe. You will find more information on the instructors while you navigate the course.

Students gain hands-on research experience and increase their understanding of the applicability of theories of social change and further information about climate change.

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Students collect soil samples from places of interest around campus and run a series of basic soil analyses to make conclusions about how soil fertility relates to the biological community and human management.

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This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Plants form a close bond with a vast range of microorganisms. In fact, this microbiome could be viewed as an extended phenotype of the plant genome enhancing plants’ ability to cope with environmental stress. To understand this connection, researchers recently examined the microbiome of the model legume Medicago truncatula. They found that bacterial diversity decreased between external and internal plant compartments and that microbiome composition was shaped by strong interactions between compartment type, soil, and plant genotype with the microbial composition of external compartments driven by soil origin and the microbial composition of internal compartments driven by host genetics. All compartments were dominated by Ensifer, the nitrogen-fixing bacteria that form root nodule symbiosis with M. truncatula..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

In this course participants will learn how to turn solar cells into full modules; and how to apply full modules to full photovoltaic systems.

The course will widely cover the design of photovoltaic systems, such as utility scale solar farms or residential scale systems (both on and off the grid). You will learn about the function and operation of various components including inverters, batteries, DC-DC converters and their interaction with both the modules and the grid.

After learning about the components, learners will be able to correctly apply them during main design steps taken when planning a real PV installation with excellent performance and reliability.

Through modelling, you will gain a deeper understanding of PV systems performance for different solar energy applications, and proficiency in estimating the energy yield of a client’s potential system.

This course is part of the Solar Energy Engineering MicroMasters Program designed to cover all physics and engineering aspects of photovoltaics: photovoltaic energy conversion, technologies and systems.

Spreadsheets Across the Curriculum/Geology of National Parks module. Students use the geometric mean and multiplicative standard deviation to examine the right-skewed distribution of nutrient concentrations in water-quality data at Mammoth Cave National Park.

Students will be able to exchange information about recycling, the environment, and animals around the world. Students will learn how to describe nature and explain their opinions regarding the environment. Students will also be able to communicate with others and present their opinions to the rest of the class on their ideas on nature.

Students will be able to exchange information about recycling, the environment, and animals around the world. Students will learn how to describe nature and explain their opinions regarding the environment. Students will also be able to communicate with others and present their opinions to the rest of the class on their ideas on nature.

This landscape and environmental planning workshop investigates and propose a framework for the enhancement, development and preservation of the natural and cultural landscape of the Cardener River Corridor in Catalunya, Spain. The workshop is carried out in conjunction with the Polytechnic University of Catalunya, and the Barcelona Provincial Council (Diputació de Barcelona).

Learning about complexities carbon stabilization firsthand with the Princeton University Carbon Mitigation Initiave's Sabilization Wedges Game

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What will Washington be like 100 years from now? This is the teacher guide companion to The State We're In: Washington (Grade 3-5 Edition) Chapter 10. The resource is designed to engage students with a launch activity, focused notes, and a focused inquiry..

A semester-long audio recording project, defined by the needs of a community organization, engages students in not only learning new content but sharing their new knowledge beyond classroom walls (and beyond the professor). This assignment, focusing on "engaged digital scholarship," challenges students to increase their information literacy and use of audio to effectively communicate scientific information for a general audience. This project has been embedded in several different introductory-level Earth science courses for non-science majors, with the resulting podcasts being shared with varied community groups. The example presented here focuses on students in a "Water: Science and Society" course generating podcasts that respond to specific content questions posed by Pennsylvania K-12 teachers, with the resulting podcasts posted on the website for the Pennsylvania Earth Science Teachers Association (PAESTA).

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To build and improve upon their science and information literacies, students create a collection of short non-fiction stories that connect to at least one of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For this assignment, the stories were then posted online for middle and high school teachers to use in their classrooms.

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A group exercise in trying to understand the many attributes that contribute to an overall assessment of sustainability for alternative energy projects.

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This is a survey course in which we will discuss the science behind historical and current environmental issues. We will discuss the major threats to biodiversity and ecosystem function. We will study how human activities have affected the limited resources of our planet. We will learn how air, water and soil degradation have affected human health. Lastly, we will explore the emerging field of sustainability, what it means, and how it is being applied in todayęs world.

The sustainability learning suites is a set of learning objects created for people with a post-secondary science background, organized in six themes: Systems thinking; Sustainable development; Population; Energy; Water and Materials. The materials are designed on Fink's Taxonomy of Significant Learning and include: learning objectives, editable slides with notes and embedded classroom activities, activities of 1-3 hours, assessments, and a set of 24 videos.

Learning about sustainability requires systems-thinking and a curiosity to explore. In the COVID-19 edition of a sustainability course, there were many chances to create new learning opportunities not only from the course content, but also from the world around us, the media and news, and from each other.Students in the course CIVE230: Engineering and Sustainable Development were tasked with making a contribution to sustainability efforts. They have been hard at work throughout the term to share a sustainability idea that were compiled in an e-book “The Sustainability Contribution Project” which showcases their ideas that cover all course topics as they apply to cities around the world. This activity encouraged students to explore sustainable cities, infrastructure, solutions and technologies globally to generate an enriched learning experience and create an opportunity for peer-to-peer learning. Together, they co-created content.This e-book serves as a contribution by the class for the class, and for the wider engineering education community. I encourage you to have a look through. 

The Daily Practice is an ongoing assignment that asks students to make a lifestyle change that contributes to environmental sustainability.

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In these open-ended but simple activities, students use basic mathematics and descriptive statistics to analyze campus sustainability efforts.

(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)

The sustainability learning suites is a set of learning objects created for people with a post-secondary science background, organized in six themes: Systems thinking; Sustainable development; Population; Energy; Water and Materials. The materials are designed on Fink's Taxonomy of Significant Learning and include: learning objectives, editable slides with notes and embedded classroom activities, activities of 1-3 hours, assessments, and a set of 24 videos.