C-FLEX: Exploring sustainable futures for Europe's digital education infrastructure

When the COVID pandemic started, our consortium members followed with worry a panicked rush to adopt education technologies “solutions”, with little regard for their long-term effects, or what leg...

C-FLEX set out to open a systemic discourse on the sustainability of digital education technology and its infrastructure. In an attempt to create a rich discourse around the topic, C-FLEX moved beyond the traditional “triple bottom line” view of sustainability: the framing of sustainability as environmental, social and economic instances, in our experience, inevitably led to a dominance of economic concerns over all others. We wanted, instead, to raise attention towards the sustainability of the two main components of digital education: technical sustainability (i.e., making sure education technologies work and are maintainable) and pedagogical sustainability (i.e., institutional readiness and ability to maintain pedagogical change). Through work in C-FLEX, we wanted to build the basis for interdisciplinary research and education on digital education technology sustainability by analysing impacts and providing benchmarking tools for each institution. This research would be functional to immediately bring learnings “out there” by teaching the next generation of digital education infrastructure builders through intensive programmes and online micro-credentialled courses.

C-FLEX implemented two macro-sets of activities: intellectual/research and education. On the research side, C-FLEX performed an analysis of the impacts and sustainability of digital education and its infrastructure, and built a set of tools for institutions and teachers to self-assess the sustainability of their own choices in digital education infrastructure. This research has been done by surveying the literature, but also by going in the field, interviewing decision makers at our universities, and at other universities in our network. Everything that was learned in this work fed immediately into C-FLEX’s educational activities. Educationally, C-FLEX piloted a multi-disciplinary online course on the topic of the project, and two intensive Challenge-Based Learning summer schools based on principles of maximisation of diversity, reflexivity, and mutual learning. All these activities featured innovative forms of teaching, from macro pedagogical methods, to the smallest details. On top of this, C-FLEX worked on a number of outreach activities to build capacity on the subject-area on the topic, and explored avenues of synergy between the project’s themes and local, national, and European initiatives on the same topics.

C-FLEX produced a set of manuals and materials that summarise all of our work in the project. The manuals contain all of our methods, so that those that want to replicate or extend our approach can do so easily. In particular, we produced a core set of booklets: 1) a “Requirements and Impacts Analysis for the sustainability of Digital Education Infrastructure” booklet; 2) a “Analyzing the Sustainability of ICT in Higher Education through an Analysis and Self-Evaluation Tool for Universities” booklet; 3) an “Challenge-Based Learning and Online Micro credentialed Courses on digital education sustainability” booklet; 4) a “A Challenge-Based Learning approach to the Impacts and Sustainability of Digital Education” collection of booklets. This last series of booklets, in particular, also doubles as a capacity-building guide for all institutions interested in implementing Challenge-Based Learning intensive courses, providing substantial baseline material. The project also performed two summer schools, in 2023 and 2024, where students got acquainted with the project’s research outcomes, and which also fed back into the project’s results. In addition to this, we produced an extended set of research articles, theses, and software that further the project’s vision, complementing and extending the work summarised on our booklets.