C-FLEX set out to open a systemic discourse on the sustainability of digital education technology and its infrastructure. In an attempt to create a rich discourse around the topic, C-FLEX moved beyond the traditional “triple bottom line” view of sustainability: the framing of sustainability as environmental, social and economic instances, in our experience, inevitably led to a dominance of economic concerns over all others. We wanted, instead, to raise attention towards the sustainability of the two main components of digital education: technical sustainability (i.e., making sure education technologies work and are maintainable) and pedagogical sustainability (i.e., institutional readiness and ability to maintain pedagogical change). Through work in C-FLEX, we wanted to build the basis for interdisciplinary research and education on digital education technology sustainability by analysing impacts and providing benchmarking tools for each institution. This research would be functional to immediately bring learnings “out there” by teaching the next generation of digital education infrastructure builders through intensive programmes and online micro-credentialled courses.
When the COVID pandemic started, our consortium members followed with worry a panicked rush to adopt education technologies “solutions”, with little regard for their long-term effects, or what legacy they would leave. As the first wave of the pandemic subsided, the chip shortage of 2020-2021 was a global reminder that, while the pandemic unfolded, the climate crisis was also a reality, and that digitalisation has very tangible environmental impacts. During that time, we saw critical voices raise concerns about the environmental, pedagogical, technical, and social effects of this accelerated process of digitalisation of education. We hardly saw, though, any voices connecting the dots between all of these effects, discussing for example at the same time the social, environmental, and pedagogical impacts of technical choices in digitised education. In a pattern which is often found in research discourse, the various concerns remained siloed, with a limited formation of a systemic view. C-FLEX tries to answer the need to build this systemic view, and to connect the many actors and stakeholders that feel the impacts, and participate in the decisionmaking, of digitised education.