An open online course covering a large fraction of the industrial ecology methods is now available under
http://www.teaching.industrialecology.uni-freiburg.de/
The industrial ecology open online course (IEooc) is a collection of web content on industrial ecology background, methods, and applications. It has two purposes: First, to document and explain some of the ‘soft’ knowledge around industrial ecology concepts, methods, data, and applications that is needed to conduct state-of-the-art industrial ecology research. Second, to guide new industrial ecology researchers towards having fun and impact with properly conducted science for sustainability.
The IEooc was developed for university students. It features the following items, which are freely available for educational use: lectures (screencasts and webinars of 15-60 minutes), exercises with sample solutions, code samples or notebooks, and reading material (papers, essays, reports, blog entries). There are more than 20 exercises and tutorials, and these form the core of this course.
The course is built using freely available tools and data wherever possible. For the basic parts of the course a pdf reader, Excel or a similar spreadsheet tool, and access to Youtube are sufficient. The more advanced parts make use of the programming language Python via Jupyter notebooks, and some of the LCA exercises use openLCA in connection with the ecoinvent life cycle database. For some exercises reading material that is not generally available is required.
The IEooc and its parts are designed for self-study, and I do hope that the material offered here will be useful to a wider audience and make IE more attractive to future scholars!
Stefan Pauliuk, University of Freiburg, Germany
