Gala: An Open-Access Platform for Interactive Learning With Sustainability Case Studies

Sustainability science has been gaining traction within academic research and teaching over the past few decades, and it is now entering a phase of greater maturity as a discipline, with links to sectors beyond the academy including energy, finance, advocacy, development, design, construction, agriculture, and healthcare. Concurrently, the growth of the internet has spurred innovation in platform development. This convergence has generated technology-enabled opportunities for training sustainability scholars and practitioners grounded in active learning pedagogies. Case studies are one active learning strategy becoming established within the fields of environment and sustainability. However, the traditional case study form and mode of delivery, which excel at a retroactive analysis of strategic decision-making and outcomes, can create challenges for teaching about issues involving emergent technologies and rapidly changing scientific and social dimensions. This article describes one novel platform, called Gala, for teaching and learning about sustainability science through case studies that address these challenges. Gala closely integrates text and multimedia components, is easily updated, and embraces content consumers as content creators and vice versa. We also report here the results of one pilot study that investigated differences between graduate and undergraduate student interactions with different case components. Results indicate that both groups heavily used the case narrative, but varied in their use of multimedia components. Such insights into patterns of case use are informing decisions about improvements to Gala and directions for future case production, teaching, and assessment, in order to create better tools for teaching and learning about sustainability.