Accoount4GreenEco - Sustainability Accounting Learning Platform for a Green Economy

Our project background

Addressing climate change is one of the most challenging problems we face, with potentially irreversible consequences for humanity’s safe operating space. To mitigate the negative environmental and social impacts of our economic system, the EU has developed plans to facilitate the green transition of its economy. These initiatives promote the allocation of financial resources to sustainable corporate activities and highlight the role of sustainability accounting for this purpose. Yet sustainability accounting is not fully covered in the EU's higher education business and accounting degrees.

To contribute to solving this problem, the EU co-funded Sustainability Accounting Learning Platform (Account4GreenEco) Project (Ref. 2022-1-ES01-KA220-HED-000089844) is working on developing an open and interactive sustainability accounting online learning environment to promote the integration of sustainability accounting into the business and accounting curricula in the European Higher Education Area to support the green transition of the EU economy. By producing this learning platform, we seek to:

1-Facilitate learners' learning to become competent sustainability accounting professionals to support the green transition of the EU economy

2-Promote learners’ sustainability awareness by exposing them to learning resources to make firms accountable for their impacts

Our plan

The platform is structured into 3 modules and populates with interactive activities, notably role-play case studies where learners are asked to make decisions around sustainability accounting based on what they have learned. To design the platform, the academic members of the project develop the learning materials that the technological partner later implements. These materials are tested via 3 teaching activities (Tas) with students. So far, we have designed modules 1 and 2 of the platform and organized the TA1. TA2 will be held in November 2024. Once the platform is ready, it will be disseminated via 2 share and promotion activities with lecturers and professionals.

Specifically, we are engaging with three different types of actors to ensure the relevance of the online learning platform:

• Students, whom with we engage through three teaching activities to test the platform during its development.
• Lecturers, whom with we engage through a share and promotion activity in which we will disseminate the platform and explain its use to encourage them to integrate it into their courses.

• Sustainability accounting practitioners, whom with we engage through our associated partner (DIRSE – the Spanish Association of Sustainability Managers), that provides feedback on the learning materials. We will also organize a share and promotion activity to disseminate the platform among professionals.

   

Our pedagogical approach

Our project relies on active learning and self-directed learning as its underlying pedagogical approaches. These pedagogies are designed to encourage learners to take an active role in the learning process and have been proven effective in enhancing environmental literacy and fostering behavioral change. Digital tools are key to unfolding these approaches. To do so, our project relies on gamification to design the interactive activities that populate the platform to help learners navigate the learning content. Gamified approaches allow learners to improve their knowledge while keeping them engaged. In addition to short activities, the platform includes a set of role-play cases where students are given a case where they must make decisions to show the acquisition of green competencies.

The role play cases expose students to different processes and decisions that organisations face when designing and disclosing sustainability information. In each role-play case, learners are given a set of introductory information and then they are asked to make decisions based on what they have learned on the platform. Depending on their decisions, they move to alternative scenarios so that they can grasp the implications of their choices. With this approach, we seek to encourage them to reflect on the impact of their decisions and how they interrelated with social and environmental aspects within organisations.

You can read more about our project on its webpage www.a4ge.eu. You can also follow our LinkedIn and X accounts, and subscribe to our newsletter to receive updated on sustainability accounting.

The project “Sustainability Accounting Learning Platform for a Green Economy” (Account4GreenEco) is co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union (Ref. 2022-1-ES01-KA220-HED-000089844). The content of this website is the sole responsibility of the Account4GreenEco Partnership and neither the European Commission nor the Spanish Service for the Internationalisation of Education (SEPIE) are responsible for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.