About
The Office of Sustainability at Amherst College created this app to promote sustainability in the college's curriculum by mapping Amherst course descriptions to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). NOTE: This tool is intended to be used as an exploratory tool only.Methodology
Course descriptions from the 22-23 school year were scraped from Amherst's online course catalog. Each course description was then run through an algorithm that searches for key words and phrases specific to each SDG (for this part, we used a modified version of the keyword list published by USC's Office of Sustainability). The top scoring courses for each SDG are presented in the course mapping section of this tool.As noted earlier, this tool is designed to be used as an exploratory tool only. The results were generated by a predictive algorithm and have not undergone a systematic review process.
Interpreting Results
Courses that score high in an SDG category have course descriptions that include many of the keywords that are frequently associated with that SDG. For example, the highest scoring courses for SDG 2: Zero Hunger most likely have course descriptions that contain several of the following key words: agriculture, hunger, global, food, systems, political, development, and malnutrition. Our model predicts that these courses are most likely to cover content related to SDG 2 based on their course descriptions. However, just because a course does not score highly for a particular SDG does not necessarily mean that the course does not align with that SDG. It is important to remember that this is a predictive model, so any predictions generated by the model are limited by the data it takes as input. Bearing these shortcomings in mind, we believe this platform can still serve as a valuable starting point for students who are interested in exploring courses that relate to particular SDGs or the sustainable development goals as a whole.
If you have any further questions, comments, or feedback, please contact the Office of Sustainability at
sustainability@amherst.edu.