Abstract:

University West is a Swedish College outside of Gothenburg, Sweden, with a regional and practical focus in Higher Education. Research status is given to two main areas, Work Integrated Learning and Production Technology. There are also a number of higher education degree programs with some 14 000 graduate and undergraduate students enlisted. As part of its profile, significant efforts are put into professional development and lifelong learning. One example that is the starting point of this paper is an online course given within the ExSus project EXpert Competence for SUStainable Production financed by the Swedish KK-foundation 2021-22. ExSus and its sequel ExSus II are aimed at supporting professional development in close collaboration with industry.

One of the participants of this course, Introduction to Sustainable Development within Industrial Production, initiated a discussion with the Sustainability Manager within his company, with headquarter local to University West. This led to a collaboration and acquisition of a series of dedicated online courses for the company, VBG Group that has global reach. In 2022 the first of six courses started, with Swedish participants at first but then with international participants from the VBG offices in Scandinavia, Germany and other EU countries, Eastern Europe, Canada, USA and South America. Over 100 people in total.

This paper describes the structure of an online course consisting of 6 half-day sessions and the outcome, in terms of self-assessed questionaires completed before the course, at the introduction session, and then at the end of the final session. These are the session themes:
0. Welcome
1. Climate change and UN Sustainable Development Goals
2. Materials and the Environment
3. Transport and Environmental Technology
4. The Lifecycle Concept within Industrial Production
5. Circular Economy and Course Wrap-Up

The sessions are, as mentioned above, entirely online and utilizes the University learning platform, Canvas, and connections to via zoom. These themes are the ones that were suggested and refined before the professional development sessions, given in English.

The participants were mainly managers, sales, HR, production and several other groups within VBG Group, slightly tailored for Scandinavia, Europe or the Americas. The evaluations indicate a very high degree of satisfaction with the course that was organized as flipped online classroom, meaning that assignments on each theme were submitted weekly ahead of session 1-5. To pass the course, every assignment needed to be passed. The final session was short participant presentations of sustainability and circularity concerning their own workplace or interest. The surveys show a significant boost of knowledge in the course area.

Keywords:

Online, Distance Learning, Global, Sustainability, Industry, VBG Group.