Green Gown Awards 2020 - Nottingham Trent University - Finalist

Sustainability by Crowd - Using crowd research technique for making a more sustainable campus

‘Crowd Research’ is a crowdsourcing technique for coordinating a large group of people in an open-ended research exploration. This technique instigates synchronous collaborations, peer-learning, mobility, and efficient use of time in research.  

#NTUCROWDRESEARCH is a series of workshops led by the crowd - a group of academic staff, Enva (NTU’s waste contractor), and both undergraduate and postgraduate students within Nottingham Trent University. Crowds are gathered to conduct a complete cycle of research in a single day to propose solutions to increase the awareness of campus recycling. We use the power of the crowd, with participants pooling their collective efforts and research findings, to investigate common recycling problems on the university campus. Active participation in the event, producing research data, and observing a flourishing collaborative approach to research is an innovative way of enhancing learning and demonstrates a unique way of increasing sustainability performance within HE environment. 

Top 3 learnings:

1. Power of the crowd can produce outcomes beyond expectation 
2. Collaboration of crowd research can be synchronous, demonstrates mobility, and generates great peer-learning; a unique tool to increase awareness in sustainability 
3. Crowd research can be used for many sustainability topics  

Videos

• Video #1 (click to hide)