Take the Challenge: Compute the CO2e emissions of your Programming Course

Abstract

[EN] Sustainability constraints ask for quick and drastic changes in the ways to teach at university. Here we study the amount of carbon emissions of lecturing a first course in programming. In addition to fix costs estimations, our study relies on a pool on student mobility patterns at our university. We estimate, per campus and level of presentiality, the amount of CO2e emissions of the course. Our results show that the main contributed cost of the course is not always due to transportation. Indeed, the difference in emissions between virtual and face-to-face is not huge and in some cases face-to-face is even better. This offers a discussion about the convenience of replacing face-to-face by virtual teaching through minimizing transportation emissions. We claim that the former can be made CO2e competitive by disseminating the lectures across the city avoiding the use of costly traveling means.