2015 Volume 11 Issue 4 Pages 348-358
We created a self-directed e-learning program for high school environmental education. The learners are expected to understand their indirect contribution to environmental problems such as global warming or energy consumption through this program. Life cycle thinking (LCT) is a key concept to link learners’ daily activities to the environmental problems. The advantage of e-learning is that it makes possible to provide schools with an opportunity of environmental education without much extra preparation required for school teachers. This feature of e-learning is especially important for LCT based education, because the concept of LCT is usually unknown by most of school teachers. The program created is composed of two parts. In the first part, learners study the LCT concept using visual materials that describe the life cycle environmental impacts of pro-environmental behaviors, such as local production for local consumption and reuse tableware. In the second part, learners calculate the life cycle energy of their own belongings using the dedicated LCA software named ‘Energy Consumption in Your Bag?!’. These learning materials can be down-loaded from the website prepared for the e-learning. Approximately 500 high-school third graders studied using this self-directed e-learning program, individually during the summer break. Their teachers’ role was to provide students with the follow-up quizzes to confirm what they had learned. The result of the self-assessment survey conducted after the e-learning showed that more than half of the learners became concerned about LCA. Moreover, there was the tendency that their concern to environmental problems was higher than that of the previous third graders in the same school. Furthermore, we analyzed the learners’ impression statements written after the e-learning, and found that the learners who began to be concerned about LCA tended to describe more about their daily lives in their impression statements than those who were not or less interested in LCA did.
