Initiatives

Going green on campus is not just nomenclature; it’s a meaningful initiative taking hold in colleges across the globe. Schools are making green practices a part of their best practices, and the trend toward moving hardcopy online supports those actions. A generous portion of green initiatives are accomplished by moving paper processes online.

Learning Management Systems (LMS)

LMS have become a diverse and embedded part of teaching in college campuses today. They provide capabilities for file posting, drop boxes, test and quiz taking, and grade return on assignments tools, just to name a few. A green initiative on university grounds revolves heavily around this increasingly essential teaching tool.

File Posting

One of the most prominent tools in the learning management system, file posting, can immediately reduce the use of paper in the classroom. In place of printing handouts of your presentation slides, just upload them and your students can access them from anywhere, anytime. Not only is this a more efficient way to disseminate course content, but it is much easier to for the student to archive the material by saving it on their machine, so it is more likely that they will be able to access it well into the future.

Drop Boxes

Another popular tool within the learning management system, an online drop box empowers students to submit assignments and projects through an online “mailbox”—a clear environmental win. Their work is uploaded to a website and later downloaded by an instructor or assistant when it needs to be reviewed and graded. Graders are then able to annotate the assignment and return it with a mark for the student. This also means there is no chance of losing the paper materials along the way, as an electronic audit trail is created along the way. Plus, these “smart” drop boxes collect all your materials in a central place and can be set up to accept assignments within an automatic timeframe. Everything is stored and processed online, and is retrievable at any time.

Online Syllabi

Did you know that one tree makes 17 reams of copy paper or 8,000 sheets? Clark University calculated their printer/copy paper consumption through a self assessment initiative called Sustainable Clark which was started by a college committee in 2006.  The self‑assessment discovered that 720 trees are harvested each year to supply printer/copy paper for Clark University. They further found out that using paper of 30% recycled content; only 504 trees are needed to supply Clark University with its printer/copy paper for a year.

By reducing copy paper consumption by 10% and by using 30% recycled content paper, only 453 trees will be cut to supply Clark University with its printer/copy paper next year. With a full‑time student enrollment of 2,235 the number of trees consumed for printing out syllabi can be further reduced by half if Clark decided to get syllabi online. Syllabus Institute has compiled a list of solutions for getting syllabi online.

Online Examinations

Tests and quizzes are another one of the largest culprits of resource consumption and waste in the classroom. Unlike materials like textbooks, the waste associated with exams is exacerbated as most of them are discarded at the end of the term (if not earlier!). Along with this, online exams can better engage and evaluate the student using interactive and adaptive media, neither of which is possible with paper exams. And as any instructor knows, grading can be a time‑consuming and cumbersome process. But by facilitating exams online, you create and administer exams without paper, centrally collect the responses, and give access to assistants for evaluation. Even better, in some cases you can automatically grade and return the results.