Engineering undergraduates do not receive enough content on sustainability in engineering, and it is usually treated as an afterthought rather than an integral part. Furthermore, sustainable engineering education is often aimed at civil engineering students, so students from other disciplines neglect to consider the environmental impact of their work. Often students are taught about standard industry practices to fit a profitable capitalist business model, with little emphasis on creating a sustainable mindset.
To counter this apathy, we will create an exciting MOOC focussed on how sustainability is incorporated in a breadth of engineering disciplines. Our course will be open to students from any engineering discipline and will inspire students to include sustainability in all their work.
Case studies of sustainable projects in civil, mechanical, electrical, and other disciplines will give them an insight of how sustainable engineering can be achieved in the real world, with the technical knowledge behind these innovations being explored. Some will include pre-recorded talks from professional engineers that worked on these projects. It will also be an interactive experience where students can sign up for a live meeting with working engineers and like-minded students who might be studying a different engineering discipline. Assignments will encourage students to think about ways they could have approached projects more sustainably in the past, and organise events exploring sustainability skills and encouraging peers to think about sustainability as fundamental to engineering.
To incentivise students to take the course, it will be ‘low-effort, high-reward'. The course will be structured over 4 weeks with about 4 hours per week but can be taken in any time frame. Upon completion of the course, students will receive a certificate, endorsed by participating universities and firms (to be shared on LinkedIn and put on your CV!), and the title of ‘EWB Sustainability Ambassador’.
Very cool!
This is brilliant!
Hello Team, this is Nasser and I have been assigned to mentor and give you some feedback- Looking forward to it. I will give this some thinking esp. against various criteria but few quick immediate comments:
1- Great concept with nice simplicity to it. Good you explained this cover across engineering disciplines and not the classic approach to Civil engineering only.
2- Help me out, what is MOOC? please define it for others like me too. This is a key word in your proposal.
3- In the first paragraph you talk of "environmental impact of their work", would be more comprehensive to also include the word sustainable as it seems to me this is what you are aiming for. Those two words compliment each other nicely, as you know sustainable has social and economical dimensions to it.
4- Good you added the idea of interacting with working engineers in the third paragraph. I think you can expand this by having feedback from real people who have been impacted by some major projects (in good and not so good ways); we can explore simple ways of doing this using material that is out there already. This will take the point home and the future engineers you are targeting will listen to the needs and feedback of the eventual customer.
Any questions let me know please, I will expand on the above and happy to chat further one on one or as a team via an online session of sorts.
Nasser
Hi Nasser, thanks for your feedback! In response to your second point, MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Course, and is an accessible online course that is usually on a platform like Udemy, Coursera, FutureLearn, edX, and there are probably more! The courses are usually well respected because they are created by or with universities and vary from very short courses of about 4 hours to several months. They are usually free to access; sometimes you have to pay for the certificate but we would aim to ensure our course is totally free for engineering students to access. Thank you for your pointer about considering all the sides of sustainability! And I agree that learning from people affected by engineering projects in addition to engineers is a good idea. Please let us know if you have any more questions/ feedback.
Also just to add we would be happy to chat as a team as you suggested! Let us know when you would be available (morning/early afternoon is ideal for our whole team due to time zones but of course any time you're available would be great) :)
Hi, I am fairly flexible this coming week and based in London. Please suggest couple of time slots and we can have say a 40 min session.
That's fantastic! How about Monday at 10am or Wednesday at the same time?
Let us go with Wed 10 am, meanwhile if I have further comments I will add here. Will you issue a Zoom invitation (I also have Teams).
A comment/question to think about before we talk; whilst it is great you want to educate the students about the importance of sustainability, how do you engage the client? after all the clients pay the bills, they develop the scope of work and will have to be part of sustainable solutions even if it means new design considerations.
A comment/question to think about before we talk; whilst it is great you want to educate the students about the importance of sustainability, how do you engage the client? after all the clients pay the bills, they develop the scope of work and will have to be part of sustainable solutions even if it means new design considerations.
Thanks for your suggestion, we will think about that before the meeting!
Anya Burakowski is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Designathon Mentor Meeting
Time: Feb 17, 2021 10:00 AM London
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86741266326?pwd=Z2FpbmQvNWd1TzRGV2l1MFNMd3ZxQT09
Meeting ID: 867 4126 6326
Passcode: vvC8SW
Great see you on Wed.
Thank you so much for your advice!
This is a cool idea - our group was considering the idea of developing a module in formalized processes for nature based solution finding and biomimicry - through the use of tools such as We didn't go with it in the end but maybe something interesting to considering in your MOOC?
What a shame, I didn't see this post until today! But that sounds like a great idea and we'd definitely look into including this kind of content in the course- it sounds like a something that would really enthuse students about sustainability! We would have loved to discuss it with you but I suppose it's a bit too late now. If we develop the course further it's definitely something we'd like to talk with you about!