Community-based propagation to scale up educational innovations in sustainability

Abstract

Many high-quality educational innovations are freely available, and some are known to motivate evidence-based climate and sustainability action. Typically, efforts to propagate educational innovations rely on outreach and word-of-mouth diffusion, but these approaches tend to achieve little. We develop and analyse a dynamic computational model to understand why and to test other propagation strategies. Our analysis reveals that outreach has limited impact and does little to accelerate word-of-mouth adoption under conditions typical in higher education. Instead, we find that community-based propagation can rapidly accelerate adoption, as is also shown by a small number of successful real-world scaling efforts. This approach supports a community of 'ambassadors', facilitating and rewarding their sharing the innovation with potential adopters. Community-based propagation can generate exponential growth in adopters, rapidly outpacing outreach and word-of-mouth propagation. Without it, we are unlikely to rapidly scale the educational innovations needed to build urgently needed capacity in sustainability. Innovative educational methods can be difficult to spread across universities and instructors. This study examines the best routes to rapidly scale new methods in sustainability education.