Often involving the production of an academic paper Thesis, Research Project Applied Work “Real-world” education for sustainability (Brundiers et al. 2010). Distinguished from Research by active engagement with selleck kinase inhibitor actors, organizations, or communities outside of the classroom. Focus on problem solving, not necessarily the production of knowledge Applied Project, Fieldwork, Internship Fig. 1 Process for first reading course descriptions to gather enough information for disciplinary MGCD0103 categorization (dark gray boxes), and then categorizing individual courses once sufficient information had been gathered to classify courses into one of ten disciplinary categories
(white boxes
with heavy outlines on the right) The first five disciplinary categories we used built on three standard models for the classification of disciplines in Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, resulting in categories for (1) Natural Sciences, (2) Social Sciences, (3) Engineering, (4) Business, and (5) Arts and Humanities (Australian Bureau of Statistics 1998; Higher Education Statistics Agency 2012; National Centre for Education Statistics 2012). We augmented this framework by adding five categories that captured the range of courses we found in sustainability degree programs: two categories specifically for sustainability see more courses [(6) General Sustainability and (7) Applied Sustainability] and three categories for research and applied work [(8) Methods, (9) Research, and (10) Applied Work]. Detailed titles and definitions of the 10 categories are shown in Table 1. Once we categorized the courses, we looked at the relative importance of different disciplinary categories required within programs based on the proportion of academic credits assigned for each core course, expressed as a percentage of the total Amylase core course credit requirements for that program. Third,
we compiled a list of between two and sixteen general course subjects within each disciplinary category (Table 1) and assigned every core course in every program to one of these course subjects to examine the distribution of subject material between programs. The number and variety of restricted and free electives were vast, and detailed course descriptions were often unavailable. Subjects were, therefore, coded for only the core courses, based on an analysis of their course titles and descriptions (Fig. 1). If there was a lack of agreement or the subject designation was unclear based on the course title and a general reading of the description, the course description was further examined for keywords in topic sentences, i.e., subject names or related concepts.