For over forty years, I have dreamed of truly accessible university courses, which would be available to nearly anyone, anywhere. In the era of the Internet, it might seem that seem that this dream could be realized by simply uploading a lecture series online. As I was once of this opinion, I started doing just that with one of my courses over a decade ago.
However, I soon realized that this did not take into account that human beings 1) have a range of different approaches to learning, 2) often learn best from a variety of different media types, and 3) are variously abled. Moreover, we cannot assume that just because something is online means that it is accessible, as 4) race, family income, and even the educational level of parents can impact what sort of Internet access a student has, as well as the devices likely in their possession. Finally, 5) the environmental footprint of online courses also needs to be addressed. To make a university course environmentally sustainable and truly accessible to nearly anyone, these (as well as a host of additional) factors need to be taken into account.
Climate Crisis 101 is my most recent attempt to make an inviting and accessible course that addresses these issues. Because the goal is to create courses that are more socially just and environmentally sustainable, I approach this issue from the perspective of climate justice.
At first glance, this may be a little perplexing. After all, what does a classroom experience have to do with the climate crisis? As it turns out, quite a bit.
Being an admitted silver-lining kind of person, I try to think of the climate crisis as something of an opportunity. Don’t get me wrong, doing so isn’t always easy, especially as I realize that many billions of beings (some human, most not) will suffer because of our rapidly and profoundly changing climate. I certainly wish that it wasn’t happening. However, we can see this crisis as an opportunity to address, in addition to anthropogenic climate change, justice issues that have long haunted us.
For example, access to higher education has traditionally come at a step price – which is rising by the year. The cost of an Ivy League education is currently around $320,000 for four years. This is just about $100,000 more than the cost of an average home in the U.S. Consequently, though various aid and student loans are available, many families and individuals struggle with the cost of higher education, even in a wealthy country like the U.S. And in most low- and middle-income countries, having access to schools like this is altogether out of reach for nearly everyone. This is, obviously, a social justice issue.
What if, however, we could give nearly everyone on the planet access to this sort of education, regardless of your race or income, whether you can see or hear, or learning challenges that you face?
I know, this sounds like an impossible dream. Frankly, I am not so sure that it is. If, instead of moving students around the planet, we moved information, it could make this knowledge available to anyone, anywhere – with a tiny carbon footprint as well. Incidentally, this knowledge would not only be available to students enrolled in classes, but the public as well, who could access, free of charge, the online course material as text, short videos, or audio podcasts.
This may sound like an impossibly ambitious goal. Nonetheless, it has been my experience that often the only way to get from here to there is one step at a time – or to be more accurate in this case, one course at a time. Climate Crisis 101 is imagined as an experiment, one of the first steps, in making more equitable and more environmentally sound courses.
Because Climate Crisis 101 is a test bad for introducing and working out ideas, it is hardly a course of the future, but rather is an effort to try to get to there from here. And it certainly doesn’t exist in a vacuum, as educators across the globe have been working, especially during the last two decades, to develop more accessible and equitable courses by way of emerging technology.
This is, incidentally, the second time that I have focused on moving knowledge rather than people around in an academic setting from the perspective of climate justice.
Back in 2015, somewhat by accident, I became aware of the fact that nearly a third of my campus’s carbon footprint – 55,000,000 pounds of CO2 or equivalent gases annually – came from flying faculty and staff to meetings and conferences. It didn’t take long for me to note the obvious: that “air travel is, environmentally, academia’s biggest dirty little secret.”
Once I started reflecting on the traditional academic conference, I quickly realized that air travel was also responsible for a companion social justice issue. As I noted at the time, “[t]he cost of airfare from many low- and middle-income countries to anywhere in North America or Europe is often greater than the per capita annual income in these countries. Consequently, scholars from most of the world’s countries, and nearly the entire Global South, have long been quietly, summarily excluded from international conferences.”
The more that I thought about it, the more I realized that the traditional academic conference had a host of additional shortcomings, such as being ablest.
So, I wrote and submitted, then rewrote and resubmitted when they were rejected, a number of op-eds for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and even the Los Angeles Times, as I wanted to draw attention to the significant shortcomings of one of the cornerstone practices of my profession. Since no one seemed interested in addressing the problem (none of the op-eds were published), I started directly wrestling with how the traditional academic conference might be reimagined. In May of 2016, we staged the first of what has become eight nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) conferences at UCSB.
Cobbled together using a range of online technologies, these conferences were both experiments to see what could be done, as well as an effort to draw attention to a worrisome issue that no one seemed to want to talk about, let alone transform. In that sense, the NCN conferences took the place of my ill-fated op-eds as a way of getting started a conversation about the shortcomings, both environmental and cultural, of academic conferences.
As with Climate Crisis 101, the core idea of the NCN conference approach is that moving knowledge around (via the Internet), rather than people, is not only environmentally sustainable, but also addresses a range of social justice issues. Hence, I think of Climate Crisis 101 as a nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) course, even though we can also view it as a nearly just course.
While I could lay out the details of how Climate Crisis 101 works here, I am instead providing a link to the course, as the first chapter explains the NCN approach in detail before actually jumping into the course material. So, in addition to hearing about the ideas behind Climate Crisis 101, you can get a better feel for the approach by actually seeing the course in action.
Note that Climate Crisis 101 is an actual course (with an enrollment of 860 students) that has been offered every Winter at UCSB starting in the 2019–20. My goal is to offer it every year of this decade, which, with respect to the climate crisis, could well prove to be the most important ten-year period in history.
Also note that, even though it may seem that Climate Crisis 101 was a response to COVID-19, the course was planned long before the pandemic and actually first ran as it was unfolding (i.e., from January to March, 2020). Although I never gave thought to the fact that such a course is in many ways tailor-made to respond to a global pandemic, it required virtually no modification when all teaching on my campus was done remotely.
As with our NCN conferences, my goal with this NCN course is both to cobble together a workable course using existing technology as well as to draw attention to the shortcomings of traditional courses. If you would like to learn more about Climate Crisis 101 and the NCN course approach, here is the link.