In 2016, the United Nations (UN) launched the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework for sustainable development and a sustainable future. However, the global challenge has been to engage, connect, and empower communities, particularly young people, to both understand and deliver the 17 SDGs. In this study, we show the benefit of a strategic planning-based experiential learning tool, the Young Persons’ Plan for the Planet (YPPP) Program, to improve the underlying competencies of Australian and Mauritian adolescents in increasing understanding and delivering the SDGs. The study was conducted with 300 middle to senior high school students, in 25 schools throughout Australia and Mauritius, over an 18-month period. The intervention included the development of research, strategic planning, management, STEM (Science Technology, Engineering, Maths) and global competency skills in the students, to enable them to build and deliver regional and national SDG plans. Research methods included pre- and post-intervention testing of the attitudes of these students to sustainable development outcomes and compared these attitudes to subsets of scientists and the Australian national population. Our results, from both qualitative and quantitative evidence, demonstrate significant improvements in these adolescents’ appreciation of, and attitudes towards, the SDGs and sustainable outcomes, across a range of key parameters. The results from the 76 students who attended the International Conference in Mauritius in December 2018 demonstrate significant improvements in mean levels of understanding, and attitudes of the students towards the SDGs awareness (+85%), understanding/engagement (+75%), motivation (+57%), and action orientation/empowerment (+66%). These changes were tested across a range of socio-demographic, geographic, and cultural parameters, with consistent results. These findings have significant implications for the challenge of sustainable education and achieving community engagement and action towards the SDGs in Australia and Mauritius, particularly for young people. As the intervention can be replicated and scaled, the findings also highlight the opportunity to extend both the research and this type of experiential learning intervention across both broader geographies and other generation and community segments.

Over the past decade, teaching and learning in virtual worlds has been at the forefront of many higher education institutions around the world. The DEHub Virtual Worlds Working Group (VWWG) consisting of Australian and New Zealand higher education academics was formed in 2009. These educators are investigating the role that virtual worlds play in the future of education and actively changing the direction of their own teaching practice and curricula. 47 academics reporting on 28 Australian higher education institutions present an overview of how they have changed directions through the effective use of virtual worlds for diverse teaching and learning activities such as business scenarios and virtual excursions, role-play simulations, experimentation and language development. The case studies offer insights into the ways in which institutions are continuing to change directions in their teaching to meet changing demands for innovative teaching, learning and research in virtual worlds. This paper highlights the ways in which the authors are using virtual worlds to create opportunities for rich, immersive and authentic activities that would be difficult or not possible to achieve through more traditional approaches.

Virtual worlds (VWs) continue to be used extensively in Australia and New Zealand higher education institutions although the tendency towards making unrealistic claims of efficacy and popularity appears to be over. Some educators at higher education institutions continue to use VWs in the same way as they have done in the past; others are exploring a range of different VWs or using them in new ways; whilst some are opting out altogether. This paper presents an overview of how 46 educators from some 26 institutions see VWs as an opportunity to sustain higher education. The positives and negatives of using VWs are discussed.

There is a strong impetus for blended learning approaches to be more widely adopted in higher education but finding an effective model for professional development of teaching staff can be problematic. In 2009, Curtin University developed an eTeaching and Learning Scholarship program for academic staff to develop exemplary online learning tasks that could be shared with the university community and inform future online teaching within their disciplines. This paper describes the design of the professional learning program together with early encouraging results that indicate both the willingness of the eScholars to incorporate additional learning technologies to extend the affordances of the university provisioned systems and to embrace authentic learner-centred tasks.