The second of ESD Exchange’s two webinar sessions takes place on Tuesday 27th April 2026 from 1pm to 2pm using Microsoft Teams. Session details, sign-up information and the link to join are all below:
University projects with real-world sustainability impacts
There is significant potential for real-world impact and increased student engagement by devising student projects that work with external partner organisations on sustainability issues. But how can this be done well and impactfully in practice?
This webinar, part of the ESD Exchange 2026 Conference explores the theme of curriculum-linked student projects that aim to achieve positive real-world impacts. Two contributions shed light on key challenges and issues, followed by time for Q&A and discussion on the themes raised.
The session will be of particular interest to academic staff, university engagement teams, education leads within schools/faculties/departments and anyone interested in increasing curriculum-based engagement with sustainability across universities. The session will be chaired by Dr Andrew Reeves from De Montfort University.
Sign-up here: https://forms.office.com/e/iAzM3ue34C
Join here on Tuesday 27th April at 1pm: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/32140869377586?p=nDcEeajr4gccmPNy82
Details on the two contributions:
Talk 1: Combatting the Turnitin Abyss for sustainable change
Zoe Phillis, Alexandra Nickel, Aadya Gupta, Prof Jen O’Brien (all from University of Manchester)
Whilst they are defined slightly differently depending upon who is using them, at their heart, living labs are about working in cross-sector partnership to address problems from different perspectives and generate innovative solutions. Ordinarily, living labs should not require additional investment, but redeploy existing resource in new ways. The University of Manchester has always maintained that our students, all 46,000 of them, are our biggest – and BEST ! – resource. We would like to critically share a special living lab. All of our students undertake assessment: every year thousands of hours of thought, work and commitment that has been invested into assessed work disappears into the ‘Turnitin Abyss’. That is, assessments are submitted, the mark is obtained, and then that insight, that thought leadership, those new ideas disappear into the Virtual Learning Environment. Often that assessment is creative and public facing, but it never moves beyond pixels. Led by Aadya, Zoe and Alexandra, we would like to share our pilot of a virtual conference where we combatted the Turnitin Abyss by hosting students’ (existing) work on social media, linking with key University channels during global SDG Teaching week. We started small, but the results were surprising, powerful and required little resource. This pilot enhanced student profiles’, facilitated understanding of their change making potential, shared some fantastic ideas, opened conversation with communities near and far, enhanced SDG awareness – and was fun! We would like to share this model, offering the possibility to join forces with other student led groups for a bigger conference.
Talk 2: Lessons learnt around the delivery of real-world interdisciplinary sustainability module.
Professor Sarah Gretton, Alice Jackson and Dr Stuart Desjardins (all from University of Leicester)
The presentation intends: to review the key aspects of delivering the Sustainability Enterprise Partnership Project module, including its structure, student engagement, and business collaboration; and to share lessons learned from implementing an interdisciplinary, action-oriented sustainability module, highlighting challenges and best practices. The Sustainability Enterprise Partnership Project is a 15-credit work-related learning module for undergraduate students at the University of Leicester. Drawing on Education for Sustainable Development principles, it empowers students to address complex sustainability issues through action-oriented learning “aiming at empowering students to take action in order to tackle with complex issues related to Sustainable Development”. (Sinakou et al., 2019). The module evolved from an institutional project providing sustainability audits for local businesses. Students collaborate with businesses, working in groups and individually, to analyse raw data and produce reports assessing sustainability performance and outlining actionable initiatives, informed by their integrated Carbon Literacy Training. This presentation will review headlines of the delivery of the module, and discuss top lessons learnt around the delivery of a real-world interdisciplinary sustainability module.
