Copenhagen Business School

Introduction and Institutional Background

CBS has been an active PRME signatory since 2008. In 2013, CBS PRME received the PRME Champion title and has since maintained the honourable title.

Our mission is to be a global PRME leader by making responsible management integral to all education at CBS and part of our organisational identity. Furthermore, we reflect upon how we enact responsible management education and make such practices explicit.

We envision a world where free education implies responsibility towards society. We strive to address and support global, regional and local responsible management, sustainability and social issues through PRME and through the advancement of the 2030 Agenda.  

PRME activities at CBS are headed by a specifically appointed Academic Director along with one full-time administrative support employees aided by one student assistant. The PRME office is part of the larger Teaching and Learning Department at CBS which gives it a broader reach and access to both institutional and financial resources.

One of the SDG integration Challenges

Mapping of SDGs in the curriculum (the method used for doing it)

The Action

Since 2015, CBS has engaged in extensive curriculum mapping and development regarding responsible management education. In 2020, a new methodology was developed and CBS PRME office has mapped all courses in all programmes at CBS for their SDG and Green Themes content.

The team consisted of one administrative support, one research assistant, and one dedicated student assistant with the support of the PRME Academic Director. The worked comprised of gathering all data from courses in 37 study programmes, developing a methodology which would allow for comparability across programmes, data analysis, compiling of results and producing individual programme reports.

The data collected was comprised of course descriptions, learning objectives for each course and programme competency profiles.

The project used the content analysis tool NVivo in order to identify and code SDG and Green Themes curriculum content. The analysis is repeated every year in order to observe progression or changes in curriculum, with one dedicated student assistant and one full-time employee working in total of 18 hours weekly on the project. Results of the curriculum mapping are shared in individual programme reports with study board directors and internal stakeholder. Green Themes mapping is also shared with the Ministry of Education at their request.

The Outcome and Impact

Overall mapping of curriculum content was presented in internal meetings and reports were shared with pilot programmes. Feedback from the meetings and the programmes was incorporated into the next iteration of the project.

Feedback consisted in visualization of data and presentation of results in such a way that it reflects the programme characteristics as well as including qualitative examples from data collected.

Lesson Learned: issues / challenges when introducing the innovation, and how to resolve them

One of the challenges of the project regards the data content analysis tool used, which is not available in all organizations due to the pricing structure. This can be overcome by using similar tools with a lower price or even freely available tools.

Another challenge is represented by the way data is structured and presented. In an institution with a larger number of programmes or a varied data set of information, a different structure or methodology might be more manageable, as well as a different approach to the type of data which is to be collected. Access to data (learning objectives, course descriptions and competency profiles) will need to be unrestricted and data presentation will need to be standardized to ease comparability.

Resources in Need to Adopt or Adapt this Approach

Alongside the human resources needed presented above, the project made use of:

• The content analysis tool NVivo and training of staff in using the tool

• Adobe Indesign was used in producing the individual programme reports

• External expertise was used in developing a programme which digitally gathers and sorts data into the files uploaded into the analysis tool

Short, medium, and/or long term Goals

The next steps in the project are the development of reports for all programmes along with the platform for information dissemination. Meetings and feedback sessions with stakeholders will be held in the next phases of the project in order to improve, build on and continue development of the methodology used.

Supporting Documents

Green themes in Higher Education. The EU , Denmark and CBS.