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The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of a sustainability course that was designed to evoke measurable transformational changes in students’ preferences and in their roles as consumers, employees and citizens, via consciously addressing sustainability issues and involving a community partner.

The research was undertaken using mixed methods. Q-methodology helped create student groups with similar preferences for sustainable attitudes and behaviours before and after the course; the most important features of attitude changes and identify the phases of transformation were explored. In-depth interviews with each participant contributed to understanding and explaining the motivation for changing preferences and generated individual-level reflections about the perceived process of transformation.

Q-method highlighted how stakeholder roles were transformed from the three pre-factors to the three post-factors and for the whole group. Seven phases of transformational change are identified based on the reflective in-depth interviews from “no transformation” to “change agent behavior”.

Findings provide new perspectives for evaluating and embracing the transformational potential of sustainability courses.

Assessing the impacts of sustainability courses on students’ transformation via measuring their mindsets and behaviour preferences prior to and after a course is still an under-researched area, especially in relation to the Q-method. A further unique feature is how the influence of engaged community partner on students’ preferences is captured. The explored scope of individual responsibility goes beyond environmental awareness and addresses participants in various stakeholder roles simultaneously, by examining their priorities as consumers, employees and citizens.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the sustained need for the physical workplace and real-life encounters in higher education even in the digital age despite being seemingly transformable into the virtual sphere as seen during the COVID-19 situation.

This study is based on a collaborative autoethnography by a group of seven higher educators with an overall 2,134 student encounters during the study’s time span. The authors then connect these practitioner observations with relevant COVID-19-related studies thereby adding to research on higher education as a workplace.

The data suggest that the physical workplace strongly bolsters the personal experience and effectiveness of higher education through contributing to its dynamics. Spaces predetermine the scope and levels of human interaction of teaching and learning. In a physical setting, all senses serve as mediators, whereas, online, only two senses are involved: vision and hearing. The two-dimensional screen becomes a mediator of communications. In the physical space, actors are free to adjust the working space, whereas the online working space is limited and defined by platforms.

Although higher education institutions may indeed fully substitute most practices formerly in a physical setting with online solutions, real-time encounters in the physical working space belong to its deeper raisons d'être.

This paper highlights the necessity of the physical workplace in higher education and describes the depriving potential of the exclusively online higher education teaching setting.