Designing the curriculum e-content for sustainable development education in higher education system- a qualitative approach

Today, with the development of new information and communication technologies, business methods, daily activities, communication with others, access to information and in general, all elements of human life have undergone a great change. These technologies are mainly aimed at improving the quality of educational services, as well as goals such as expanding the number of contacts, educators and educational institutions, and even companies and business centers to enable cost-effectiveness and in the shortest possible time to convey the desired content to students, customers and the audience in general. Education for sustainable development is an approach to education that seeks to empower people to take responsibility for building a sustainable future. In order to better achieve the goals of education for sustainable development, the e-learning approach can be used, which in this study has developed and validated the framework of the electronic curriculum for sustainable development in higher education. The main purpose of this study was designing curriculum electronic-content for sustainable development education in the higher education system.

The research project was qualitative and in particular ’qualitative case study‘; The statistical population of the study consisted of three groups: 1: All members of the faculty of civil engineering, architecture, agriculture; 2: All members of faculty of educational psychology of Shiraz University And 3: all experts, scholars, and researchers in the field of electronic curriculum planning; To collect data questionnaire and interview were used. To analyze the data, a consensus-based approach and the Bowl technique were used; Also, open-ended interview was used.

The data obtained were analyzed by the software Nvivo version 8 using Thematic analysis technique and content design curriculum for sustainable development education in Iran's higher education system As a comprehensive Thematic, 4 organizing themes and 73 basic themes were identified and the content network was extracted. Curriculum framework for sustainable development education at higher education level designed in the form of twelve elements: goal, content, role of instructor, learner role, teaching method-learning, evaluation, teaching materials, type of curriculum, level of education, participants in the design and implementation of curriculum, place of training, and time of training. The curriculum was compiled in five chapters, five titles and sixteen chapters. As such, this curriculum can be taught in the form of an instructional book as a two-unit course in a variety of disciplines, including civil engineering, architecture, and agriculture.

In the higher education system, the issue of sustainable development is not specifically addressed, but as a part of the courses in civil engineering, architecture, agriculture, students are taught these contents. On the other hand, the integration of e-learning as an achievement of the new educational system in the process of teaching and learning and the curriculum of educational institutions is inevitable. According to the results of this study, it can be said that many courses in the fields of civil engineering, architecture, agriculture, directly or indirectly refer to the issue of sustainable development or professors, according to their expertise and excellence, in relation to the subject of development to provide stable information to students. In the present study, while paying attention to this issue, an attempt was made to design the electronic content of the sustainable development education curriculum in the higher education system.