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Environmental politics raises questions of direct relevance to students’ everyday lives. As a lecturer on a module entitled Global Environmental Politics: Sustainability, Security and Social Movements, Carl was keen to explore ways to encourage students to critically reflect upon their own lives, and their relationship to environmentally damaging or more sustainable patterns of production and consumption.

The module comprised 74 second and third year undergraduate students, and ran from October 2010 to January 2011. Carl decided to use a range of online teaching and learning tools available through Blackboard, including surveys and blogs, to encourage students to critically reflect on the themes of the course and their own lifestyles, as well as to enable more interactive patterns of teaching and learning.

The attached report details some of the successes and difficulties associated with introducing these online teaching techniques. Student blogs, in which they were asked to share material, discuss relevant issues, and reflect upon their changing attitudes, comprised part of the formal assessment for the module. Online surveys (Survey 1 | Survey 2) were used at the start and end of the module to gauge student attitudes to a variety of environmental issues, and to provide a forum for students to reflect upon their own learning processes.