Are distance higher education institutions sustainable enough?: a comparison between two distance learning universities

• Autor(a) principal: Casado-Aranda, Luis Alberto
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Outros Autores: Caeiro, Sandra, Trindade, Jorge, Paço, Arminda, Lizcano Casas, David, Landeta, Ana
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.2/11124
• topic: Sustainability; Distance higher education institutions; Sustainability assessment tool; Online universities; Sustainability; Case study; Online universities; Sustainability assessment tool; ODS::04:Educação de Qualidade; ODS::12:Produção e Consumo Sustentáveis

Purpose – Universities are continually transforming its structure and governance in response to the new social, environmental and economic challenges. Particularly, there has recently been a growing academic interest for measuring sustainable practices of higher education institutions (HEI) aiming to monitor and reduce their carbon emissions, as well as transform them into more sustainable organizations. More recent studies began to focus also on the sustainable performance of distance education Universities. So it became crucial to evaluate their sustainability practices through sustainability assessment tools with the aim of improving their sustainability performance and boosting their role as agents of academic, social and economic change. The purpose of this study is to assess and compare holistically sustainability implementation in two similar distance learning universities and to evaluate their advantages and disadvantages. Design/methodology/approach – One of the most rigorous and internationally used sustainability assessment tools was used – the Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System, to evaluate and compare sustainability implementation in two distance universities, one from Spain and another from Portugal: the Madrid Open University and Universidade Aberta. Indicators of both universities were compared and ways of improvement in both universities were widely discussed. Findings – The results of this research show that there is a similar pattern in both universities. Both have low performance in campus operations and low levels of community participation but good performance in sustainability courses and programmes offer. The results of both institutions were compared and allowed a learning process for improvement. Distance learning universities Received 21 July 2020 Revised 5 October 2020 14 October 2020 Accepted 21 October 2020 International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education © Emerald Publishing Limited 1467-6370 DOI 10.1108/IJSHE-07-2020-0260 The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/1467-6370.htm Originality/value – This research hopes to contribute to the continuous research about the usefulness of sustainability assessment tools in particular when applied to distance universities at the time that offers new paths to carry out improved sustainable practices in crucial areas of interest such as research, administration, education and resource-saving. This research also highlights the value of distance learning universities and their ability to be more sustainable after the advent of COVID-19