Case-based collaborative group coaching in Corporate Sustainability

In the main course of the Group for Sustainability & Technology at D-MTEC, students learn about key concepts in corporate sustainability and develop skills to implement them in the real world. The course prepares students for making well-informed sustainability decisions in their future careers.
In an immersive company case study, coached by experts and aided by self-learning tools, students collaborate in sustainability teams to solve problems and negotiate decisions at the board level. Central to the course is the opportunity to reflect about the involved trade-offs in sustainability and how to transform companies towards sustainability.

The course uses constructive alignment to bring the various innovative teaching and learning elements (e.g., case-based experiential learning, reflective thinking and peer coaching exercises, blended learning with videos and quizzes) into a coherent transformational journey. In the Fall semester 2021, we started the course online, with three live sessions on Zoom to welcome students to the course. On Moodle, students were provided with video tutorials and quizzes, allowing them to study on their own time.
The climax of the course was the “Board session” in week 12. Through 19 parallel sessions – mostly online due to the Corona situation – each student acted as a Board Member of the case company. They presented a proposal specific to a sustainability challenge, that they had developed over several weeks in smaller teams and with the support of a coach. Following the discussions, they voted on how the company should strategically trade-off between the sustainability impact of the proposals.
In addition, we introduced a new text-based anonymous coaching exercise that helped students reflect on their attitudes and worldviews about sustainability. Students could write a series of journal entries with peer feedback, deepening student understanding. This journal was hosted on the Moodle add-on Eduflow.
We are currently preparing to teach the course in the same format with minor improvements in the Fall semester 2022.

The project achieved its goals: the course was redesigned and delivered in the revised format, despite lock downs and campus restrictions due to Corona. Students indicated that they experienced an interesting, engaging course that helped them learn about the topic in an applied way that they could apply to non-academic contexts. Students enjoyed the mix of live and asynchronous learning opportunities, group work and reflection opportunities.
We investigated student learning in four main ways:
1) Quality of submitted course work and course exams: the coursework submitted was generally of a high standard. The exam grades were similarly of a high overall standard.
2) Post-exam evaluation: the results of the evaluation survey were positive, with students indicating that the exam was considered fair (4.8 out of 5), that the learning materials from the course were suitable for the exam (4.9 out of 5), and that they were overall satisfied with the exam experience (4.4 out of 5). They also indicated that the revision for the exam had noticeably increased their interest and enthusiasm for the topic (4.1 out of 5).
3) Student feedback throughout the semester: we asked two students to give us weekly feedback about their experience participating in the module. They highlighted numerous small optimisations, but overall their experience was very positive.
4) Reflection journal: as part of a research project called ‘Learning to address tensions in corporate sustainability’, the student reflection journals were collected and are being analysed to understand how individuals improve their ability to recognize tensions in corporate sustainability, how their perspectives of solutions change over time, and how effectively individuals translate solution approaches. The project was approved by the ETH Ethics Commission under the proposal No. EK-2021-N-112, and the results are forthcoming.

We have already applied the lessons learned from this module (e.g., how to design engaging, interactive teaching spaces that empower students to dig into a topic more deeply and in an applied way), to other courses at ETH and beyond. From the Fall 2021 module, we have developed a teaching case study, using approaches we developed to encourage others to also engage with corporate sustainability in a meaningful, interactive way.

• Innovation in Learning & Teaching Fair 2022