A Participatory Curriculum Approach to ICT-Enabled Education for Sustainability in Higher Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Interesting paper on  topic of participatory curriculum planning model and ICT enabled education for sustainability of higher educations. A participatory curriculum planning model and research performed can serve as a good example for other institution planning  education for sustainability in higher education.

Maybe a comment on the second sentence in the paper that says that leaders in HE have led the world towards this crisis. Who are the leaders and how did they caused the crisis? Maybe a different wording would be appropriate here.

Regarding the research design, questions, hypotheses and methods, there is a room for improvement, i.e. the hypothesis and to add the  surveys as appendix to the paper.

Author Response

First of all, we express our gratitude to both reviewers for their constructive feedback. The paper has been restructured according to the guidelines for an article and not a case report. Thus, the methods and materials are figured as a section in the paper. In order to accommodate the structural changes a slight restructure of the model has been done.

To avoid confusion, we state that “In this paper, we do not focus on the results of the study as such, but instead, we are using some of the results and their interpretations to explore the ICTeEfS participatory curriculum planning model” (Sentence 151-153). There is thus no need to submit research instruments.

The comment “that leaders in HE led the world towards this crisis” is a strong one, we have changed the world ‘leaders’ by graduates (Sentence 22-23). Our argument which is also supported by literature is that education whatever the level bears its own impact on what is happening outside, such as the sustainability crisis.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

thank you for the Case report, it is interesting and helpful to organize and improve the management of the courses. 

The material is useful and relevant, well structured. 

The text needs a more detailed description of the methods used, i.e., the questionary is mentioned in lines 188-206, but it would be more pertinent to give the reader an idea about the form and content of the questions. 

Nevertheless, the survey does not represent the basic element of this article (which is the Case report), so, the methodology should be represented in a more detailed manner, but it is not a crucial point.

What is really more interesting is the influence of the Erasmus project - the choice of the Asian universities to take part in the European project can have a dramatic impact on the result. But, again, taking into account the type of the paper (Case report), the authors do not pretend to give a universal vision, but inform the readers about an interesting example. Thus, it seems to be significant to mention the limitations of the study with the fact of the partnership and networking impact on the results. 

Good luck for these modest corrections and I hope to see your paper published very soon.

Author Response

First of all, we express our gratitude to both reviewers for their constructive feedback. The paper has been restructured according to the guidelines for an article and not a case report. Thus, the methods and materials are figured as a section in the paper. In order to accommodate the structural changes a slight restructure of the model has been done.

To avoid confusion, we state that “In this paper, we do not focus on the results of the study as such, but instead, we are using some of the results and their interpretations to explore the ICTeEfS participatory curriculum planning model” (Sentence 151-153). There is thus no need to submit research instruments.