Abstract:

Humanity's consumption of Earth’s natural resources exceeds its biocapacity. This imbalance can be quantified through the world’s Ecological Footprint as an extrapolation of all humans’ individual footprints. As many individuals don’t know about their Ecological Footprints, we want to spread this societally essential knowledge together with practical information.

Objectives of the E-co-logical Footprint Training are:
- Providing young learners between 10 and 18 with knowledge regarding the Ecological Footprint, including backgrounds on what is included in such a footprint.
- A call to action should trigger choices for daily habits and activities with a lower Ecological Footprint.
- Empower the youth to take action collectively– in order to sustain life on our planet.

Our methodology to reach these objectives was to create a high quality blended educational package that addresses the needs at different learning stages, get schools and class teachers interested in using the educational material, involving the whole school community. A central part to raise understanding is the new created ecological footprint calculator, which allows to log daily activities and calculate students’ ecological footprints.

The results are an online and an offline course consisting of the following topics
1) general introduction
2) Mini Hectare Workshop
3) Nutrition
4) Housing
5) Mobility
6) Consumption
and the ecological footprint calculator.

A lot of background materials for teachers comprising of
1) Background info on the ecological footprint concept
2) Guide to excursions and projects
3) Guide to implementation
4) Calculator warmup
5) Calculator manual and
6) E-learning manual
complete the elearning course.
The material is available on the website e-co-foot.eu.

During the project 12 teachers from four countries were trained on the project contents, our multiplier events attracted hundreds teachers, trainers, staff from school community and education systems, parents, locals, local representatives from the municipality as well as other local NGOs to participate.

We see the impact of awareness-raising on the effect of sustainable consumption in our alumni’s local and regional study and work environment and an international role model effect as a vital part of the course.

Conclusion:
The training lays the ground for a pan-European solution on how to raise schoolkids’ awareness on sustainability which cannot only be adopted beyond the partner countries but also beyond Europe because of the self-scaling character, its “translatability” and transferability of the e-learning-tool and the Ecological Footprint-calculator. The cross-border cooperation initiates the transversal take-up of innovative practices in education, the ICT-involving cross-community approach (school children and their environment, no segregation) among other things is a strategy against socio-economic digital divide.
Apart from this educational long-term effect, the project also benefits the ecosystem itself. We share – knowledge and responsibility and we care – for us, others and our planet. Together.

Keywords:

Ecological footprint, footprint calculator, sustainibility, online teaching.