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This paper seeks to argue that global change calls for training in intercultural, interdisciplinary and interparadigmatic professional behaviour. Thus a concrete web‐based five‐level training procedure “Surfing global change” (SGC) is to be proposed that includes reflection of game players' own knowledge, views and values. Rules of SGC are to be defined in detail.

Based on a didactic analysis, the design of the negotiation game SGC is a rhythmised sequence of learning content, reviewing colleagues' work, debating competitively and constructing a consensus on a multi‐stakeholder theme. Hereby learners acquire a 360° view of the issue and learn to understand their adversaries.

For two dozens of themes, Surfing global change has successfully been implemented for students of “Global studies” and of “Environmental systems analysis” and other interdisciplinary curricula at several universities.

Practically, one or two dozen students can follow two or more weekly hours during a semester in order to play “Surfing global change”. A wealth of multi‐stakeholder themes can be explored using this gaming procedure moderated by the author. Learners bridge “geographies of perspectives”.

Resilience and employability of students increases with their improved intercultural, interdisciplinary and interparadigmatic skills.

This paper defines the normative set of rules of this original game created by the author. Surfing global change has already attracted international rewards.

Aims to examine a negotiation‐oriented and partly web‐based game “Surfing Global Change” (SGC) invented by the author based on didactics of self‐managed learning and successfully implemented in WebCT.

Along three historic generations of web‐based teaching (WBT), the key functionalities of any platform (content, discussion and evaluation) are perceived to be utilized in a characteristic way depending on the prevalent didactic concepts. The changing roles of teacher and students are highlighted using the example of SGC Level 3, where students assess one another's competence, each trying to outdo the others in controversial arguments

The outlay of Surfing Global Change aims at accomplishing sustainable results for complex themes. Thus SGC sets out to weigh out competition vs consensus, self‐study vs team work, emphasizing one's own standpoint vs readiness to compromise, differentiation into details vs integration into a whole. SGC hence wants to mirror professional realities along five interactive game levels: learn content and pass quizzes; write and reflect a personal standpoint; win with a team in a competitive discussion; negotiate a complex consensus between teams; integrate views when recognizing and analyzing global long‐term trends.

Some interactive assessment functionalities are still missing in current platforms.

In advanced university courses the negotiation game SGC was repeatedly used as a procedural shell for interdisciplinary themes.

The paper shows that a “communicative space” is created by utilising mainstream web platform technology, capable of transposing visions of “progressive education”. The definition of three generations of WBT allows for a functional differentiation in the styles of using web‐based tools.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how learning technology could be applied to the development of educational tools for global climate change. The task to be performed in an informed dialogue is to assess the causes and drivers for global climate change and to produce an improved basis of scientific understanding for the implementation of the climate protection targets suggested for each country. By character, this approach integrates the political and the scientific level.

The paper applies learning theories and options for educational technologies to socio-economic, technological, biospheric, political and scientific themes relevant to present climate change.

Drivers, effects and subsequent measures are subject to highly nonlinear effects. Thus, the combination of a (scientific, fact based) “Global Change Data Base” and a (dialogic, communication based) discourse (in the spirit of “Surfing Global Change”) seems best suitable to produce solutions for the seemingly unresolvable issues of climate protection. This combination of approaches is entitled “Tackle the Task of a Transition through Technological Targets (T5)” and allows the application of hypotheses generated by students in a scaffolded setting of discursive learning.

Suggestions for CO₂ abatement measures are currently passing the process of political negotiation in all countries in the world. The different views and patterns of ethical values are harmonised during the T5 learning process and symbolise the required political process of consensus finding among and between different ministries, countries and global interest groups.

This approach includes social and natural driving factors such as population, land use, economics, politics, energy systems, the global carbon cycle, biosphere and climate, and thus offers a more comprehensive learning endeavour than many other approaches.

The overall purpose of this paper is to detect spatial, temporal, sectoral, thematic and other patterns or transitions in techno-socio-economic evolution that are likely to co-determine future development and allow the steering of it. The development of a “Global Change Data Base” (GCDB) promises a graphically and geographically oriented tool for the representation of correlations for global long-term data series.

A literature analysis supports the interpretation of such “pattern recognitions”, especially the literature in the areas of economic growth, systems analysis, energy economics, social indicators and quality of life. Preconditions for economic growth are empirically analysed on a sectoral level along with prevailing structural shifts in the use of energy sources.

The main outcome is a distillate of a few formative “paths of development”, according to a synthesis of to-date growth theories. These lines might influence development in future decades and co-determine the degree to which sustainability targets are met. Debates and discussion procedures make use of such findings and outline modes of actions.

Developmental university curricula such as “Global Studies”, democratisation endeavours based on analyses of economic performance of (partly) democratic systems or global governance of science could profit from a consensus on global trends patterns, similar to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change endeavour at the United Nations level.

Such heuristic methods could suitably mediate (in “multicultural” manner) between contradictory paradigms of global economic development that are mainly ideology-driven and hamper global society’s joint action.

In short, this is an empirical work on pattern recognition in global evolution using aggregated spatially and temporally enabled data. It refers to the historic example of Kon-Tiki which undertook a surprisingly long journey based on precise knowledge of ocean currents and wind without applying own force.

On the educational level, this paper aims to show a practical case of dialogic web‐based learning. It has provided a consensus during a web‐based negotiation game between four different parties on poverty and inequality. On a multicultural level, this paper seeks to offer diverse cultures of argumentation on global poverty.

The methodology is a web‐based and real life negotiation game, namely “Surfing Global Change” which includes structured online review processes on literature‐based research and reflection.

The paper provides the consensus of four different parties on global development and poverty, and a new system of scaling development based on democratic decisions through a round table for all countries from the global north and the global south.

The presented dialog and consensus‐finding process concentrates on poverty and inequality from the point of view of the G‐8, NGOs, the global rich and the global poor.

This research, based on literature, is formed through a dialog and consensus finding between four different parties (G‐8, NGOs, the rich and the poor).

Acting in an increasingly complex and dynamic global world requires students to analyze and discuss professionally many of the international challenges that the world is facing due to globalization. The purpose of this paper is to describe and evaluate the implementation of information and learning technologies (ILTs) in the practical case of the web-based negotiation game “Surfing Global Change (SGC),” which fosters holistic thinking and consensus building. The paper analyzes the technological and social processes during the game and provides a brief overview of its content, in this case the migration and refugee crisis in Austria in 2015.

Review and evaluation of the social and technological processes connected to SGC by one participating student, in this case the author of this paper, to enhance students’ points of view on ILTs.

The implementation of ILTs in university learning environments enhances student motivation and optimizes learning experiences. By slipping into different roles, taking perspectives and finding a consensus, SGC fosters holistic thinking, sensitivity, negotiation and problem-solving skills, which are essential in a variety of multi-cultural settings.

The results obtained are based on a single case study and a single student’s viewpoint. According to the rules of SGC, the chapter that focuses on the case study, i.e., the refugee and migration crisis in Austria, is written from the perspective of the stakeholder “concerned citizen” and does not necessarily reflect the personal opinion of the author.

Participants’ perspectives of, experiences with and evaluations of ILTs are essential to improve the quality of web-based learning tools, such as SGC.

The purpose of this paper is to first define the “jet principle” of (e‐)learning as providing dynamically suitable framework conditions for enhanced learning procedures that combine views from multiple cultures of science. Second it applies this principle to the case of the “Global Studies” curriculum, a unique interdisciplinary curriculum at Graz University in Austria that is targeted to multicultural and developmental learning among students from diverse ethnic and disciplinary backgrounds.

Social and learning procedures are heuristically analysed based on ten years of interdisciplinary experience in interdisciplinary learning settings in a multicultural environment with critical approach to globalisation, while also diverse scientific disciplines are counted as “cultures of understanding”.

The outcomes of the analysis suggest that the negation‐oriented web‐supported five‐level learning suite “Surfing Global Change” (SGC) is capable of providing helpful framework conditions to multicultural learning that can suitably be applied in the “Global Studies” curriculum as well as in other similar international curricula.

Quality criteria are subject to scientific cultures and hence differ from discipline to discipline; thus representing continuous challenge for suitable perception of actors and bystanders.

Complexities of cultural diversity are reflected also by complexities caused by origins in diverse scientific cultures. For constructing thorough and practically implementable consensus solutions, dialogic processes and peer review are best mediated through web‐based discussion, for which this paper provides examples. Discourse‐oriented features and amendments for curricula of “Global Studies” are presented.

Networking among multicultural and interdisciplinary curricula with a critical stance towards globalisation is facilitated through suggestions in this paper.

By offering a new type of graphic notation for learning procedures, this paper facilitates new perspectives on the intrinsic dynamics of learning, adoption of new standpoints and acquiring a 360° view of the institutional landscape and interest patterns in complex multi‐stakeholder issues such as globalisation.

The purpose of the present paper is to describe a web-based consensus-finding procedure, resulting in an agreement among the group of participants representing global stakeholders regarding the interdisciplinary topic in a university master's seminar on “Global Studies”. The result of the collectively elaborated solution pertains to the forward-looking and jointly agreed topic of migration policies.

The core part of the web-based negotiation game “Surfing Global Change” utilised here is a controversial group discussion. A subsequent step creates an agreement among discussants. The group of participants, in this case co-authors of this paper, developed a final agreement on possible future political adaptations and guidelines to improve current standards in the global management of refugee and migration issues.

The findings offer several political possibilities for European and African states including structural recommendations as well as cooperative development policies.

The result is a catalogue of tentative recommendations to improve international policies relating to current migration problems, here focused on migration between Africa and Europe.

Considering the creativity of the entire procedural structure combined with an ordered scientific methodology, the outcome could promise an interdisciplinary result. Effects of group dynamics, cooperation, scientific research and diplomacy are integrated into consensus building.

The aim of this article is to present the development‐oriented Master's curriculum “Global Studies” (GS) at the University of Graz, Austria, as an example of interdisciplinary academic training with the purpose of fostering inter‐“cultural” understanding. It aims to show that scientific disciplines can be understood as “cultures of cognition” producing own views of realities.

Based on a decade of previous experiences, the communication and assessment functions of e‐learning platforms and e‐journals are used to facilitate stepwise approximations among the various “cultures of understanding”.

Despite severe financial limitations, peer‐oriented planning and lecturing efforts since 2004 have resulted in a bundle of electives and in a new Master's curriculum elaborated cooperatively by the faculties of the legal, economic, historic, cultural, natural and communication sciences at Karl‐Franzens‐University Graz. Both the bundle of electives and the Master's curriculum appear to offer a truly “m:n type” interdisciplinary and intercultural design which assumes various stakeholder‐dependent perspectives of multi‐faceted realities.

The wealth of interdisciplinary and intercultural thought and practice can be best “proceduralised” through dialogue‐oriented educational technologies.

In practical terms, hundreds of students may follow these web‐enhanced curricula that are based on the materialised results of their founders' ethical systems.

This is the first paper that outlines the Global Studies curriculum at Graz University.

This paper is the continuation of an earlier paper in this journal on global megatrends provoking institutional changes. It contains sectoral analyses with relevance to environmental protection. Conclusions for suitable institutional reorganisation of (environmental or other) institutions are presented. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A planet-wide information system might optimally also include areas such as human development indicators, water supply and demand and deforestation issues.

While administrations are increasingly oriented towards servicing a society, environmental institutions should specifically take care of global megatrends in the following areas: genetic engineering and biological safety, integrated plant technology in industry, climate protection, agriculture, noise, emissions and air pollution, sustainability, spatial planning and regional planning, radiation protection and nuclear power, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and Environmental Information Act, traffic, forest, water.

The approach of this paper is the long-term matching of (national) administrative structures with (global) megatrends.