"<< Background >>Environmental sustainability is today’s most acute challenge. The European Commission’s Zero Pollution Action Plan 2021 declares that “the public health, environmental, moral and socio-economic case for the EU to lead the global fight against pollution is today stronger than ever”. As human behaviour is largely responsible for the environmental crisis we are facing, creating conditions in which governments, organisations and individuals are inclined to make eco-friendly and sustainable choices will be highly instrumental in the crisis mitigation. The European Commission has identified it as one of “the most effective ways forward” in order to achieve its “Zero Pollution Vision for 2050: a Healthy Planet for All”. Promoting social behaviour change also features in the five priorities of the Education for Climate Coalition, a flagship initiative of the European Education Area. In the meantime, right in front of our eyes, Blockchain and an array of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) have launched a revolution in the way governments, organisations, and individuals work together. At its heart, Blockchain is a database distributed among different computer servers, keeping a log of records cryptographically protected and organised in blocks of transactions, with no need of a third-party authentication. DLT and ‘Blockchain’, which is one type of DLT, allow immutable, transparent, traceable records of data. It provides a simple, secure way to establish trust for virtually any kind of transaction worldwide. The irrefutable aspect of DLT provides a new approach for promoting accountability of government, organisational and individual activities. Therefore, DLT’s potential to induce behaviour change is enormous. While the revolutionary potential of DLT has been largely tested in the financial domain, its possible use to address sustainability challenges have been explored far less. Application of DLT for environmental monitoring projects is in this regard very promising: water and air pollution levels can be monitored and recorded in an immutable manner, making falsification impossible. Giving citizens open access to trustworthy data can be conducive to their own personal accountability, empowering them to participate in environmental justice or ‘zero pollution pledges’. But to produce significant impact, DLT applications need to be designed with a knowledge of what drives human decision-making. To discover more ways DLT can contribute to improved accountability for actions and to unlock the transformative power of this technology for environmental good, non-technical issues need to be addressed. Higher education institutions play an important role in preparing the next generation of Computer Science engineers capable of tackling societal issues through breakthrough technologies. However, most EU universities lag behind when it comes to teaching DLT in combination with necessary non-technical skills to Computer Science students. Existing numerous online and offline courses on Blockchain cover the technical, financial, legal aspects of the technology but very few teach how to leverage it with the aim of tackling environmental problems. As Dr. Massarotto from UCL notices: “Educational materials are often superficial or overly-technical making their understanding of how blockchains will impact in the near future a challenge”. Future professionals will need to tackle strategic questions that DLT raises, and this will require critical, creative thinking skills, the understanding of complex, decentralized systems, the ability to design social behaviour, as well as to work in interdisciplinary teams. Currently, students still struggle with the distributed approach typical for DLT, as they are trained to deal with centralised systems. Moreover, Computer Science students lack the tools that would allow them to make a step from technical knowledge to identifying and solving certain environmental issues.<< Objectives >>The overall objective of the project is to build European higher education capacity in teaching DLT in combination with Environmental Engineering, Design Thinking, Behavioural Psychology/Behavioural Economics to Computer Science students at the Master level, in order to enable them to develop decentralised applications addressing the issue of environmental sustainability on a strategic level - aiming at a wide-spread social change. In order to achieve this objective, it is necessary to equip the next generation of professionals in Computer Science and beyond (environmental engineers, green NGO activists, designers of products & services, designers of smart cities & Industry 4.0, etc.) with the ability to develop solutions with a ‘decentralised’ and ‘green’ mindset. Creating a novel pedagogical framework that would allow developing such a mindset in students through the teaching/learning process is one of the project goals. The project team also aims at producing an innovative curriculum and a set of digital OERs that could be validated and used oncampus, online or in a hybrid setting not only by the members of the consortium but by dozens of universities Europe-wide.Another goal is to take full advantage of digital social interaction tools and set up a decentralised network of communities and supportive tools for connecting Computer Science students to the wider communities (DLT experts, environmental activists, behaviour economists, service designers), that can offer teachers and students learning and project development support in the context of the extremely interdisciplinary curriculum that we propose to create. In line with the decentralised logic that this resource will have, breaking down barriers between professional communities and allowing peer-to-peer exchange of knowledge will help to increase the quality of the learning outcomes and bring ‘green’ DLT-based projects to fruition by multidisciplinary self-organised teams.<< Implementation >>All BC4ECO activities have been designed and planned with the project objectives in mind. The partnership will organise seven transnational project meetings that will be instrumental to the project management and to the production of project results, as the meetings will allow partners to plan their teamwork and reflect on the progress. The work on the project results will be mostly happening between the face-to-face project meetings via digital tools for online collaboration and communication. However, the first transnational meeting will include an internal Ideation Workshop, where a co-creation process drawing from diverse fields of expertise will lead to the first draft of the BC4ECO novel pedagogical framework, aimed at instilling ‘decentralised’ and ‘green’ mindsets in students through the teaching/learning process.Organisation of three oncampus teaching and training events - two Summer Schools and one Teacher Training Workshop - will greatly contribute to the validation of the BC4ECO pedagogical framework, the course and the open educational resources. The Summer Schools will be organised in order to pilot the two educational modules with students and collect their feedback. Lecturers and researchers will learn from each other while observing peers giving classes during the Summer Schools. The Teacher Training Workshop will target the teachers from the partner institutions and beyond - all those interested in adopting our pedagogical methodology, replicating the course, or integrating BC4ECO OERs into their existing curricula. The Workshop will help teachers to become practically fluent in using distributed ledger technology in combination with associated methods, and to cultivate students with the ‘green’ and ‘decentralised’ mindsets. Feedback collected from the participants of the teacher training event will inform the further improvement of the project results.The partners will organise seven multiplier events, which are necessary for both dissemination of the results and stakeholder engagement. Important external experts and other stakeholders will be invited as participants to these events, their feedback on the project results will be collected and analysed. This will help to ensure the quality of the results. The multiplier events are also aimed at promoting the exploitation of the project results as widely as possible for a greater impact on the European higher education system. To maximise the target audience outreach, partners will co-locate five multiplier events with relevant national or international conferences, such as EUA Teaching and Learning Forum, Blockchain for Europe Summit, Next Web Amsterdam, Internet Week Denmark.<< Results >>The general outcome of the BC4ECO project will be an established strategic partnership of four organisations from across four countries - Denmark, Estonia, the Netherlands and Russia - in teaching distributed ledger applications development for environmental good. It will provide a standard of excellence for higher education in Europe in this area. All project results will contribute to this outcome. The major results of the project will be the design and validation of the innovative curriculum - an interdisciplinary course “Blockchain for the Environment” (6 ECTS) enriched with digital and interactive Open Educational Resources (OERs). The course will consist of two modules - basic and advanced - 3 ECTS each, made available through a MOOC platform. The ‘basic’ module and the first MOOC “Basics of Blockchain for the Environment” will explain the main principles of the distributed ledger technology (DLT) and its potential for environmental protection to Bachelor and Master students who have never been taught about this technology before. The module will combine explanations of DLT principles with such approaches as critical thinking, design thinking, behavioural design, environmental intelligence. Students will learn how to use these approaches for creating DLT applications capable of convincing people to make eco-friendly decisions. The module will also equip the non-technical audiences, e.g. staff of ‘green’ NGOs, with the building blocks necessary to work smoothly as a team with computer scientists capable of building DLT applications. The ‘advanced’ module and the second MOOC ""Leverage Blockchain for the Environment"" are aimed at Computer Science students at the Masters level and with a certain background in distributed applications design. The module will guide students through the entire cycle: from analysing environmental challenges, selecting those issues that can be solved with the use of DLT, identifying the role of social actors in the problem, using design thinking methods to ideate solutions, and applying knowledge of behavioural psychology to build DLT applications that allow to alter social behaviour for the benefit of the environment. The set of digital OERs that BC4ECO will produce includes an e-Course Reader, a Video Collection, a Teacher Guide, an Interactive Multimedia eBook, and an online Ecosystem for Learning and Project Development. These OERs will make the entire course available to different types of learners, while the project results - better known and accessible Europe-wide. The OERs will be piloted in the partner organisations during two Summer Schools. Creation of the Teacher Guide will allow to introduce the BC4ECO educational modules beyond the partner organisations and help to improve the quality of teaching and training in this breakthrough area in Europe, thus boosting skills and employability of learners.The BC4ECO team will also develop a novel pedagogical framework showcasing the non-functional characteristics of DLT: immutability, irreversibility, transparency, consensus, distributed ledger, peer-to-peer transmission, provenance tracking, fast but costly nature of transactions. The methodology will be first formulated in the Concept Paper ""Translating the Distributed Ledger Technology Approach into Innovative and ‘Green’ Educational Methodology"", then tested with stakeholders, elaborated in the Teacher Guide and, finally, after the analysis of all lessons learnt during the project implementation, presented for a wide audience in the Interactive Multimedia eBook format. All project results will be designed in regular consultations with stakeholders. They will be suitable for on-campus, online or hybrid teaching and learning. The BC4ECO will also create conditions for the recognition and certification (ECTS credits) of learning achievements, both in the organisations within the partnership and beyond, to make it more appealing to replicate the course for other universities."