Abstract:

Ensuring sustainability has been a widely debated topic today, and the United Nations 2030 agenda has established 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that ought to be considered by individuals and organizations all over the world [1]. The 4th SDG advocates inclusive and equitable quality education and the promotion of lifelong learning opportunities for all. Thus, Universities and professors have an important role to contributes to that [2,3]. However, they must play a more active role, not only fulfilling the necessary requirements in terms of the 4th SGD with regard to education, but thinking more holistically to ensure sustainability and including as many SGDs in the implementation of their teaching and learning practices. Few articles have explained the importance of the role played by each higher education discipline in achieving sustainability goals, namely in short-cycle higher technical courses.

This article aims to fill this gap and has two objectives:
(i) to describe the innovative teaching and learning practices implemented in the marketing discipline of a short-cycle higher technical course;
(ii) to explain the contribution of each of these practices to the achievement of the sustainable development goals (SDG).

This study focuses on the short-term higher technical course in Sales and Marketing Management at the University of Aveiro, involving a total of 30 students enrolled in the Marketing discipline. The results show that innovative teaching and learning practices were used, namely Project-Based Learning (PBL) and, also, Authentic Learning (AL), and that these made it possible to contribute a little to the achievement of a total of 5 SDGs established by the United Nations. Overall, this study provides valuable cues for teachers and course directors that aim to achieve sustainability goals by innovative teaching and learning practices.

References:
[1] UNESCO, Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, 70/1, Resolution adopted by the General Assembly on 25 September 2015
[2] P. J. Comyn, “Skills, employability and lifelong learning in the Sustainable Development Goals and the 2030 labour market,” International Journal of Training Research, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 200–217, 2018.
[3] E. Boeren, “Understanding Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4 on ‘quality education’ from micro, meso and macro perspectives,” Int. Rev. Educ., vol. 65, no. 2, pp. 277–294, 2019.
[4] D. Kokotsaki, V. Menzies & A. Wiggins. Project-based learning: A review of the literature. Improving schools, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 267-277, 2016.
[5] P. S. Chiu, Y.H. Pu, C.C. Kao, T.T. Wu & Y.M. Huang. An authentic learning based evaluation method for mobile learning in Higher Education. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, vol. 55, no. 3, pp. 336-347, 2018.

Keywords:

Authentic learning, marketing, project-based learning, skills, Sustainable Development Goals.