Abstract:

The UN approved in 2015 the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development. It includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aimed at improving people’s quality of life as well as the health of the environment. These goals refer to everything from the elimination of poverty to the fight against climate change, education, women's equality, the defense of the environment and the design of cities. Universities play an important role in achieving these goals. However, it is uncommon for Spanish university students to receive information sustainability and, specifically, about what they can do to help reach the 17 ODS by 2030. In this study, we developed and conducted a teaching innovation program aimed at increasing students’ awareness about environmental issues and pro-environmental behaviors. The program has been conducted at Universidad de Zaragoza (Teruel campus) within two consecutive years. In the first year, students received seven seminars that combined theory and practice. Each seminar was designed to address a specific SDG. The seminars were delivered at the university by an interdisciplinary team of experts formed by biologists, environmental activists, teachers, and sociologists, among others. During the second year, the seminars were delivered online through Moodle and Edpuzzle. This was done in order to reach a larger number of students as well as to motive students’ participation in the program through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). In both years, participants were divided into two groups:
1. Experimental group, formed by students who participated in the program and
2. Control group, formed by students who did not participate in the program.

We followed a pre (T0)-post (T1)- intervention design, and collected data before and after the program was delivered (i.e., four times).

Our results show that the program was effective in improving students’ awareness about environmental issues as well as their frequency of conducting pro-environmental behaviors. This was the case both for the first and the second year. However, statistical differences between T0 and T1 were larger in the first year, when students participated in the program while being in the classroom with the group of experts. Future studies should examine how to reach a large sample of students through ICT without diminishing the efficacy of the program.

Acknowledgement:
This work has been supported by University of Zaragoza: PIIDUZ_19_052, PIIDUZ_19_048 and PIIDUZ_19_177

Keywords:

Sustainability, innovation, interdisciplinarity.