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This study aims to explore how the boundary between science and society can be addressed to support the transformation of higher education towards sustainable development (HESD) in the sense of the whole institution approach. It analyses students’ learning experiences in self-led sustainability projects conducted outside formal curricula to highlight their potential contribution to HESD. The students’ projects are conceived as learning spaces in “sustainability-oriented ecologies of learning” (Wals, 2020) in which five learning dimensions can be examined.

Using an iterative, grounded-theory-inspired qualitative approach and sensitising concepts, 13 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted exploring students’ learning experiences. Interviews were categorised in MAXQDA and analysed against a literature review.

Results revealed that students’ experiences of non-formal learning in self-led projects triggered deep learning and change agency. Trust, social cohesion, empowerment and self-efficacy were both results and conditions of learning. Students’ learnings are classified according to higher education institutions’ (HEIs) sustainability agendas, providing systematised insights for HEIs regarding their accommodative, reformative or transformative (Sterling, 2021) path to sustainable development.

The education for sustainable development (ESD) debate focuses mainly on ESD competences in formal settings. Few studies explore students’ learnings where formal and non-formal learning meet. This article investigates a space where students interact with different actors from society while remaining rooted in their HEIs. When acting as “change agents” in this hybrid context, students can also become “boundary agents” helping their HEIs move the sustainability agenda forward towards a whole institution approach. Learning from students’ learnings is thus proposed as a lever for transformation.

In this opinion article, the authors share their experiences with and perspectives on course design requirements and barriers when applying challenge-based learning (CBL) in an online sustainability education setting. CBL is an established learning approach for (higher) sustainability education. It enables teachers to engage students with open, real-life grand challenges through inter-/transdisciplinary student team collaboration. However, empirical research is scarce and mainly based on face-to-face CBL case studies. Thus far, the opportunities to apply CBL in online educational settings are also underinvestigated.

Using the TPACK framework, the authors address technological, pedagogical and content knowledge related to CBL and online sustainability education. The integration of the different components is discussed, providing teachers and course designers insight into design requirements and barriers.

This paper supports the promising future of online CBL for sustainability education, especially in the context of inter-/national inter-university collaboration, yet emphasizes the need for deliberate use of online collaboration and teaching tools.

Physical education (PE) and PE teacher education have great potential to target goals that are important from an education for sustainable development (ESD) perspective. However, ESD has not been studied extensively in the PE context. The purpose of this paper is to explore subjective theories of PE teacher educators about the concepts of sustainability and ESD because they are important precursors of implementing ESD in PE teacher education.

This study was conducted using a qualitative cross-sectional design. Subjective theories about sustainability and ESD from N = 9 PE teacher educators from a university in Germany were assessed in a multistage process, including semistructured interviews and the structure-formation technique. Subsequently, subjective theories were analyzed using qualitative content analysis.

The results reveal a wide range of subjective theories about the concept of sustainability. PE teacher educators described the dimensions of the sustainability concept (ecological, economic, social and political) to different depths and placed different emphases in terms of the levels of action needed to reach sustainable development. The subjective theories regarding the concept of ESD mostly include instrumental and emancipatory aspects of ESD. These subjective theories differ in that they emphasize different forms of ESD.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first of its kind to examine subjective theories regarding the concepts of sustainability and ESD in the context of PE teacher education. This study is one of only a few studies to provide detailed insights into the subjective theories of teacher educators in the area of sustainability and ESD.

This study operationalizes risks in stakeholder dialog (SD). It conceptualizes SD as co-produced organizational discourse and examines the capacities of organizers' and stakeholders' practices to create a shared understanding of an organization’s risks to their mutual benefit. The meetings and online forum of a German public service media (PSM) organization were used as a case study.

The authors applied corpus-driven linguistic discourse analysis (topic modeling) to analyze citizens' (n = 2,452) forum posts (n = 14,744). Conversation analysis was used to examine video-recorded online meetings.

Organizers suspended actors' reciprocity in meetings. In the forums, topics emerged autonomously. Citizens' articulation of their identities was more diverse than the categories the organizer provided, and organizers did not respond to the autonomous emergence of contextualizations of citizens' perceptions of PSM performance in relation to their identities. The results suggest that risks arise from interactionally achieved occasions that prevent reasoned agreement and from actors' practices, which constituted autonomous discursive formations of topics and identities in the forums.

This study disentangles actors' practices, mutuality orientation and risk enactment during SD. It advances the methodological knowledge of strategic communication research on SD, utilizing social constructivist research methods to examine the contingencies of organization-stakeholder interaction in SD.

Several studies have attempted to explain the integration of sustainable development in business school curricula. However, little is known about who (male students vs female students), at which age (under 21, 21–25 and 26–30) and at which stage of their undergraduate education (freshman, junior or senior) can attain and retain an adequate understanding of sustainability in accounting education. For this reason, the present study aims to investigate the students' interest in sustainability in accounting with respect to their demographic factors.

The study used a quantitative research design where data were collected at a single point in time. Further, an independent sample t-test, one-way ANOVA and factorial design were performed on 132 responses conveniently collected from accounting students in the College of Business Administration (COBA) at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University (PMU) in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia.

The study found no differences between the attitudes of male and female students toward sustainability in accounting education. Similarly, no statistical differences were found in the three age categories identified in this study. However, significant results were found throughout the different academic classifications (seniority): freshman students, junior students and senior students. Further, differences in the mean scores for freshman and junior accounting students were different between the male and female students, indicating that both male and female senior students' attitudes toward sustainability in accounting education were higher than those of male and female freshman and junior accounting students. The study concluded that students achieve an adequate understanding of sustainability in accounting education related to the relativism category of the Perry model of intellectual development.

Literature on attitude of students toward sustainability in education, specifically accounting education, is questionable and needs further exploration. This is due to the fact that only a small number of accounting students have been exposed to sustainable accounting education. Similarly, a recent study found a significant deficiency in sustainable accounting education in four Saudi Arabian universities, with only 4.5% of respondents knowing the comprehensive definition of sustainable development and 88% respondents having very low to low familiarity with the term sustainability.

This study presents a framework to estimate throughput and cost of additive manufacturing (AM) as related to process parameters, material thermodynamic properties and machine specifications. Taking a 3D model of the part design as input, the model uses a parametrization of the rate-limiting physics of the AM build process – herein focusing on laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) and scaling of LPBF melt pool geometry – to estimate part- and material-specific build time. From this estimate, per-part cost is calculated using a quantity-dependent activity-based production model.

Analysis tools that assess how design variables and process parameters influence production cost increase our understanding of the economics of AM, thereby supporting its practical adoption. To this aim, our framework produces a representative scaling among process parameters, build rate and production cost.

For exemplary alloys and LPBF system specifications, predictions reveal the underlying tradeoff between production cost and machine capability, and look beyond the capability of currently commercially available equipment. As a proxy for build quality, the number of times each point in the build is re-melted is derived analytically as a function of process parameters, showcasing the tradeoff between print quality due to increased melting cycles, and throughput.

Typical cost models for AM only assess single operating points and are not coupled to models of the representative rate-limiting process physics. The present analysis of LPBF elucidates this important coupling, revealing tradeoffs between equipment capability and production cost, and looking beyond the limits of current commercially available equipment.