Stefan T. Siegel2025-03-272025-03-272025-03https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/122241Context: The urgency to integrate sustainability into higher education is increasingly recognized. University instructors need to develop and implement effective strategies for sustainability education to prepare learners for complex global challenges (Bianchi, 2020; Brandt et al., 2022). Problem: Despite the growing emphasis on sustainability, many educators (still) lack key competences (Corres et al., 2023) and practical tools to effectively incorporate sustainability into their courses. The challenge lies in empowering educators to rethink and redesign their courses to weave in elements of ESD 1 and 2 (Vare & Scott, 2007) to not only talk about but to live sustainability. Intervention: The research-based and practice-oriented further education course SE101 is specifically designed to address this gap. It offers two modules tailored to different levels of prior knowledge and goals: Module 1 covers basic concepts of sustainability (e.g., planetary boundaries; Rockström et al., 2009) and (higher) education (e.g., constructive alignment) its relevance to higher education, providing an overview of different learning outcomes (e.g., European Commission, 2022;), learning activities (Rieß et al., 2022), and forms for assessment (Wilhelm et al., 2019) that relate to sustainability education. Module 2 focuses on practical application through a hands-on design challenge, enabling participants to create and implement educational patterns (Dilger, 2023) aligning learning objectives, activities, and assessments with sustainability competences. Outcomes: The course exists since 2022 and has been implemented several times in a blended-learning and a web-based-training version at different higher education institutions. It has been further developed through analyzing the course using multiple lenses of critically reflective teaching (Brookfield, 2017). It is based on the latest findings of sustainability (education) and quality criteria for educational media/teaching. Keywords: sustainability, constructive alignment, teaching, learning, university instructors, design-based researchsustainabilityeducationconstructive alignementteachinglearninghighereducationesdacademic developmentfacultycourseonlinedesign thinkingconference contribution