Advancing education for sustainable development through community and design in the ABPxODS platform

Despite the presence of frameworks and guidelines for advancing United Nations Agenda 2030 through education, there remains a notable absence of supporting scaffoldings and community-building platforms specifically designed to facilitate these goals. This paper addresses this gap by describing and evaluating the creation of a teacher community platform built through participatory design to support educators in promoting Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). This paper analyzes the results of the participatory design process, the designs created and shared on the platform, the log data, and the responses from an acceptance questionnaire. The ABPxODS platform integrates an authoring tool to help teachers create learning designs based on Project-Based Learning (PBL) while addressing key competencies for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in line with UNESCO’s ESD guidelines. Aligned with teachers' articulated needs, the platform includes community features to support collaboration among teachers and with entities. The analysis of the collected data indicates generally effective use and highly positive acceptance of the ABPxODS platform among educators. Educators particularly value the opportunity to draw inspiration from designs shared by peers, as well as intuitive learning design features that scaffold the authoring process. While teachers also value and utilize the collaborative features of the platform, future research should assess their effectiveness over longer-term usage. The study contributes to advancing ESD research and practice by showing how a community-supported learning design technology supports the integration of SDG competencies into pedagogy, with implications for scaling ESD and guiding the development of educator support infrastructures.