As a company Learna has always had a keen eye on environmental issues. This was formalised in May 2019 when Prof Steve Davies first wrote a paper on the Environmental impact of online courses versus one residential event per year.
See also Resilience & professional development during isolation.
The global pandemic has shown that many people in office-based jobs have been able to transfer to home-working with ease. Our students are all working alongside their studies, so it makes enormous sense that their education can be fully online, providing them with all the benefits of no commute, taking breaks to honour family commitments, and ensuring their work/life balance remains intact.
We have looked towards the 17 UN Sustainable Development goals and considered which of them we believe our online education provision and internal actions as a company can affect:
As the environmental benefits for online education are already fully recognised, we turned inwards to see what else we could do as an organisation to make Learna a cleaner, greener place to work.
We wanted to shout out to the world about our environmental concerns; we decided to join a scheme which would recognise our efforts and push us further to achieve our eco goals of becoming carbon neutral. We joined the IIE scheme in early 2020 and have now achieved our Bronze award.
As part of this, Learna has made the “cycle to work scheme” available to all employees as well as encouraging the reduction of energy consumption and increased recycling within the office. We have switched to Fairtrade refreshments and are looking at eco-focussed team building events. We have already set up running and cycling groups online to encourage staff wellbeing as an added bonus.
Due to the pandemic, staff are currently working from home but we are looking at a way forward to allow staff to continue to partially work from home ongoing, once things return to normal.