Education for Sustainable Development—The Case of Massive Open Online Courses
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The current heavy reliance on online communication and learning imposed in response to the Coronavirus pandemic has reinforced the need for effective high-quality educational materials and approaches, prominently including Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals. This article examines economics and finance Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as particular components of ESD in in higher education.
The article is well written, clear, and appropriately organized. After an extensive summary of the status of ESD in the context of SDGs and the role of MOOCs in delivering ESD, a keyword analysis of course descriptions is presented. While limited in scope to economics and finance MOOCs that related to different degrees to certain SDGs, the results provide an adequate basis for the authors’ conclusions.
The authors recognize that course descriptions in economics and finance, which due to the nature of the interdependence of the individual SDGs, play a role in many different goals and targets. Consequently, a more holistic and integrative approach is essential in future course development. This is evident in some of the offerings.
The main limitation of this study as an approach to assessing the suitability of MOOCs for ESD is the difficulty in ascertaining the educational outcomes of content fragments that are conceptually connected in the abstract (and course description), but perhaps not adequately presented and integrated in the course itself. This also leads to the authors’ remarks on the need for creating a wider range of active learner-centered, problem-oriented approaches for ESD.
Overall, this article provides useful insights in the MOOC offerings in finance and economics and points the way to further research that is needed to understand the learning offered at different levels and the means of integrating MOOCs into more learner-centered active experiences.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
thank you very much for the reviewing our manuscript and all your valuable comments and suggestions regarding our study.
We are sending our response to your comments in the attached file.
Sincerely,
Agnieszka Hajdukiewicz
and Bożena Pera
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The article presents a study on implementing education for sustainable development in MOOCs. The research objectives of the paper are clearly justified in the introduction section, the research process is presented in sufficient detail.
The structure of the paper feels slightly out of balance. Theoretical sections (Introduction, Literature review) take more than half of the body text, which leaves less space for the actual results of the study.
It would have been interesting to give some more background details about the courses that were identified as the final sample. To understand the geography of sustainable development education it would have been interesting to know from which countries the courses came (you only mention that they were from 20+ countries).
In the conclusions section you could elaborate on the practical implications of this study for developing education for SD. The significance of the results could be highlighted better.
Despite these comments I suggest to accept the submitted arcticle after minor revision.
Minor comments:
1) On line 233 you list various types of MOOCs (BOOCs, COOCs, etc). It does not make sense to list these abbreviations without explaning them. I would simply remove less known types of MOOCs.
2) Typo on line 167, missing space from “problem- and action-oriented”
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
thank you very much for the reviewing our manuscript and all your valuable comments and suggestions regarding our study.
We are sending our reponse to your comments in the attached file.
Sincerely,
Agnieszka Hajdukiewicz
and Bożena Pera
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Understanding how MOOCs contribute to the SDGs is in principle an interesting question. The authors are conducting a study to see how MOOCs support SDGs by looking at descriptions from courses in economics and finance. I have several concerns.
- Did the authors find that there was variation across different MOOC platforms?
- How were the keywords selected?
- What explains the difference across the two disciplines?
- Are the results surprising? That is, do the courses address this issue more frequently or less frequently than we should have expected?
- How do the authors explain that some of the SDGs are covered quite frequently and others are barely mentioned? What are the implications of that finding for reaching some SDGs earlier than others, assuming that MOOCs do indeed play a role in reaching the SDGs?
- Overall, other than the general insight that MOOCs in these two fields sometimes cover some SDGs (to somewhat oversimplify the conclusions), what do we learn and how are these findings useful?
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
thank you very much for the reviewing our manuscript and all your valuable comments and suggestions regarding our study.
We are sending our response to your comments in the attached file.
Sincerely,
Agnieszka Hajdukiewicz
and Bożena Pera
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
This revised version is much improved and the expanded discussions make it more relevant and interesting.
