Corporate Sustainability
Update: The course includes several mandatory sessions that participants must attend to successfully earn credit points. It is not possible to take the class purely online
Corporate Sustainability is the flagship course of the Group for Sustainability and Technology at D-MTEC. In this course, students learn about key concepts in corporate sustainability and develop skills to implement them in the real world. The course prepares students for making well-informed sustainability decisions in their future careers.
The course uses constructive alignment to bring the various innovative teaching and learning elements (e.g., case-based experiential learning, reflective thinking and peer coaching exercises, blended learning with videos and quizzes) into a coherent transformational journey. Students can now flexibly, efficiently, and effectively acquire the conceptual foundations that are essential for a substantial understanding of corporate sustainability.
The lecture supports the ETH critical thinking initiative. In 2018, SusTec’s Corporate Sustainability lecture was nominated among the finalists of ETH Zurich’s KITE Award for innovative teaching.
Innovative and current: The Corporate Sustainability course is constantly changing in response to academic and corporate engagement with the topic of sustainability. Stimulated by this societal engagement, the course is also a place for innovation in teaching. In 2018, SusTec’s Corporate Sustainability lecture was nominated as a finalist of ETH Zurich’s KITE Award for innovative teaching. In March 2021, the lecture team received an Innovedum grant for the project “Case-based collaborative group coaching in corporate sustainability”. During 2021, the course was redesigned, transforming its approach and strengthening its student-centered learning. We integrated collaborative activities into the course, in particular with a 360° case study of a large Swiss retail company to foster holistic and cross-disciplinary learning.
Overview
The course is designed around a tailored learning journey that exposes students to both holistic-abstract learning as well as immersive-applied learning.
Course Administration
If you are interested in the course “Corporate Sustainability” or our innovative teaching approaches, please contact us!
Project lead/ course lecturer: Prof. Volker Hoffmann
Project lead/ course lecturer: Dr. Johannes Meuer
Project lead/ course lecturer: Dr. Alejandro Nuñez-Jimenez
More information in the ETH Course Catalogue
363-0387-00L DownloadCorporate Sustainability
The lecture is open to all ETH students. We want to work with curious students who are interested in learning about corporate sustainability and who think analytically and creatively about companies and their relation to sustainability. Students have to be willing to work in small teams to achieve excellent results. The lecture is not about consuming PowerPoint slides. Students are active participants and contribute to the course. They are expected to commit themselves to the lecture after the introduction session. The course unit highlights the development of skills through its key elements (critical thinking assignments in e-modules and group work in the track phase).
Class size is expected to be about 160-200 students. For part of the semester, the class is split into 10 sustainability challenges, with about 20 students in each, working in groups of 4-5 students. Each challenge will be coached by a SusTec researcher. Students will be able to indicate their preference for up to 3 challenge topics, before a final distribution of students across the challenges is made by the lecture team.
The lecture is integrated and/or recommended in the curriculum for students pursuing these degrees:
- Management, Technology and Economics Master
- MAS in Management, Technology, and Economics
- Energy Science and Technology Master
- Integrated Building Systems Master
- Environmental Engineering Master
- Mechanical Engineering Bachelor
- Environmental Sciences Bachelor
- Food Science Bachelor
- GESS Science in Perspective