This project has the overarching goal of building a strong and sustainable partnership between UPF (Brazil), Unisa (South Africa) and HAW Hamburg (Germany) to create and deliver open educational materials for higher education institutions. As a result, students will be introduced to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and become aware of how they can contribute to achieving the 2030 Agenda. Through the perspective and expertise of two excellent and renowned universities from the Global South, their experiences, regional challenges and best practices will also be made available to students from Germany and other countries in the Global South and Global North, maximizing the impact of the project.
As the project not only focuses on producing materials for nine of the SDGs (#1, #2, #8, #9, #10, #11, #15, #16, and #17), but also invests considerable intellectual and time effort in contextualizing the materials in terms of regional specificities and providing translations into local languages, the materials produced under this project will help reach an especially large number of students. This in turn will promote the implementation of the SDGs on the ground and may have an upscaling effect. The teaching materials will be made available on a Moodle platform with the open CC license CC-BY-SA-NC, so that teachers, but also all other interested parties, can download these materials (e.g. PowerPoint slides, a handbook, further literature and best practice examples) and use them freely for non-commercial purposes. The created materials will be presented in workshops with teachers of the participating universities and their feedback will be requested. The materials will also be presented to external stakeholders, such as NGOs from the education sector, to also solicit their perspectives and inputs.
Further research will be promoted through exchange trips of young scholars from UPF and Unisa to address the challenges that remain in the implementation of the SDGs through joint publications in (high-level) journals and book series, and to promote international collaboration, e.g. by supporting PhD students or post-docs or study/research visits and promotion of the produced materials at international events. In addition, the exchange opportunities will foster future South-South collaboration and joint sustainability events, and may also strengthen the existing partnership and presence in developing joint research initiatives, publications in international journals, and reports on sustainability in higher education.
