As part of our monitoring activities in the ESD team, we conduct an annual review of ESD and SDG-related keywords across our programmes and modules at DMU. The 2025/26 academic year edition of this analysis has just been completed, and shows good progress across our faculties in terms of keyword incidence and alignment with the SDGs and ESD principles in our courses.
ESD is understood as the knowledge, skills, values, attitudes and behaviours needed for educators and students to make responsible choices for sustainable development in society. Each of the 935 programmes and 7,060 modules available in the 25/26 academic year were analysis against three sets of keywords with a custom Python script, assessing titles, descriptions and learning outcomes for presence of ESD-related keywords.
- “Core” keywords are holistic concepts of sustainability, addressing social, economic and environmental dimensions such as “responsibility”, “sustainability” and “SDGs”.
- “Extended” keywords cover only one of the three dimensions above, such as “environmental” or “equality”, and are inclusive of the “Core” keywords
- “All” keywords are the broadest set, covering sustainability topics, pedagogic approaches and learner competencies for sustainable development, and are inclusive of the “Core” and “Extended” keywords.
This analysis will be used alongside further engagement with programme and module leaders to enhance our alignment with ESD principles across our taught and research courses at DMU.
For more detail, the full report is available here: ESD Curriculum Analysis Report