Sustainability in Practice: Online course by the University of Penn

Sustainability is a practice operating across a variety of scales and skills. We will explore the ways that decision makers use systems analysis and design thinking to confront the career-defining challenges facing the next generation of leaders. Networks of practice from across North America and around the globe will provide case material and guest lectures.

About the course

Sustainability is defining a generation of students and young professionals and their influence is transforming things like cities, companies, and laws around the world. Sustainability is often explained as meeting "the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." In practice, this means understanding connections, including connections across time. These connections create systems that are greater than the simple sums of their parts, with consequences that are often unexpected by people paying attention to only one part of a system. This course provides an introduction to the ideas and practices that people are using to understand and change these connections in pursuing more sustainable processes, communities, environments, and organizations.

Course Syllabus
Week 1: Connections
Week 2: Accounting
Week 3: Resilience
Week 4: Emergence
Week 5: Jurisdiction
Week 6: Performance
Week 7: Disruption
Week 8: Connections

Course Sessions
September 15, 2014 - November 10, 2014

For further information, click here.