First MSC Strategic Advisors Meeting
The weekend of Oct 13-15, 2017 brought together a group of local, national, and international collaborators to exchange insights about the future of case-based learning and explore areas for more formal partnership. Attendees included participants from Harvard University, the Indian School of Business, the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, Tsinghua University (China), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Yale University, along with Academic Innovation and School for Environment and Sustainability (University of Michigan), and the City of Ann Arbor.
Read more ›Baltimore Smart Meters case published in Sustainability: The Journal of Record
After being published on MSC learning platform, the Baltimore Smart Meters case was peer reviewed and published in Sustainability: The Journal of Record as ‘University of Michigan Sustainability Teaching Case Smarting over Smart Meters: Does Smart Grid Technology Have a Home in Maryland?’. This piece includes the main narrative and some Edgenotes of the digital case and is intended to reach a broader audience.
Read more ›The Baltimore case goes to Baltimore
On Monday Oct 10, the Baltimore case is going to be showcased in a networking session during the 2016 AASHE meeting. This session will bring the case back to Baltimore and bring together both practitioners and educators to share their experiences and ideas on how this new sustainability education tool can create more environmentally sound and educationally exciting colleges and universities.
Adaptation in Ethiopia MSC article published
Telling the story of how the Ethiopia case came together, ‘A National Adaptation Programme of Action: Ethiopia’s responses to climate change’ was published in WDP. The article also introduces the various scholars and practitioners who contributed to the podcast.
Read more ›First MSC academic article published in WDP
‘Towards a revolution in sustainability education: Vision, architecture, and assessment in a case-based approach ’ was peer reviewed and published in World Development Perspectives. The article provides an overview of the MSC project, presenting its core pedagogical theories, expected impact, and initial positive assessment results.
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Wolf Wars case translated and taught in Gabon
In collaboration with the REFRESCH project, this MSC was translated into French and then ‘taught’ by a combination of National Park Agency Administrators, University Professors and Vocational High School Instructors at a workshop on the historic grounds of the Nobel Prize winning Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon.
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First Curricular Advisors meeting
Curricular advisors from diverse sectors gathered to review submitted proposals for potential MSCs, and provide input on which would receive support to help them come to fruition.
Initial assessment
Initial quantitative and qualitative assessments have been conducted in both undergraduate and graduate level classes on the UM campus, as well as during orientation sessions at the UM Biostation in northern Michigan.
Read more ›From an idea to implementation: Pilot cases
MSCs have been taught in an undergraduate course on Culture, Environment and Adaptation, and a graduate courses on Non Profit Management Approaches. Several are also being adapted for eventual use in grad courses on Environmental Economics, and Urban Sustainability. Student discussion groups produced feedback on the first implementation of cases that is shaping their further use in the classroom.
Partnership for academic innovation
MSC joined forced with University of Michigan’s Office of Academic Innovation, a pioneer in using digitally enhanced tools for better teaching.
Partnership with a scholarly journal
To bring MSC case research to a broader audience, MSC partnered with Elsevier’s World Development Perspectives (WDP) journal. The journal promised to publish one to three MSCs in each issue.
Resources secured
The MSC initiative won a 4-year 1.6 million dollar grant to build a case-based curriculum for the sustainability field. The grant was dispersed in January 2016.
Read more ›The incubation stage
Inspired by case-based teaching and the It’s Hot in Here radio show, the MSC team sat down together to put ideas for new, multimodal cases into a project proposal.
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