Our foot print

An online school can look weightless. It is not. We know that the energy footprint of digital technology is immense and often hidden, and we believe anyone who designs has a responsibility to keep that consumption low and to make its impact visible.

Learning at a distance pollutes far less than learning on a campus. A study of twenty university courses by the Open University in the United Kingdom found that distance learning used 87 per cent less energy and produced 85 per cent less carbon dioxide than full-time study on campus, mostly because students no longer travel or move away from home (Roy, Potter and Yarrow, 2008).

That saving is not zero. The films, the pages and the computers that carry this Academy still use energy, and that use is ours to answer for. We are working on a way to reduce our footprint and to compensate for what remains. If you have questions about how the Academy works, or know how a small online school can do this well, write to us.