Abstract
With the increasing awareness of sustainable development in higher education institutions, it has become an essential part for setting training program and curriculum. The key step is how to integrate sustainable development requirements into professional courses among college students education to make the theoretical groundwork possible in all disciplines. The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic approach through top-bottom to integrate sustainability contents into curriculum as well as quantifying influence degree of different courses on sustainable development. It mainly takes the training program setting of higher education institutions as the research object, and analyzes the relevance of training goals, graduation requirements, core courses, curriculum system and sustainability factors. Taking general education courses, subject basic courses, professional courses and optional courses as examples, the relevance between sustainable factors and curriculum design is quantified combining qualitative and quantitative analysis method for providing valuable reference for decision makers. All majors of University of Shanghai for Science and Technology (USST) are analyzed through considering whether or not containing sustainability factors like environment, society and economy. The data are collected from the training program of all majors in USST. Furthermore, the major of mechanical design, manufacturing and automation in USST is used as a case study to reveal the importance of integrated sustainable factors, and the significance of higher education of engineering specialty for the implementation of sustainable development.
Highlights
In recent decades, sustainable development (SD) has been widely recognized in various industries, such as manufacturing (Chiarini, 2014), design (Shapira et al, 2017), packaging (Nigel et al, 2017), chemicals (Rajeev et al, 2019), etc
The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic approach through top-bottom to integrate sustainability contents into curriculum as well as quantifying influence degree of different courses on sustainable development
This paper propose a systematic method for analyzing correlation of sustainable development and curriculum to assist the decision maker in higher education set training goal and plan
Summary
Sustainable development (SD) has been widely recognized in various industries, such as manufacturing (Chiarini, 2014), design (Shapira et al, 2017), packaging (Nigel et al, 2017), chemicals (Rajeev et al, 2019), etc. Higher education as institution of cultivating talents plays a very important role in promoting sustainable development idea into teaching and students education procedure (Zhou et al, 2020). The concept of higher education for sustainable development has been recognized as a priority, which make the students better understand sustainability (Wu and Shen, 2016). The main contents of sustainable design teaching include: sustainable development (resources, social responsibility, systems and services, designer responsibility, business driving force), design oriented towards sustainability (guiding students in what aspects should be embedded with sustainability factors). Higher education institutions could provide strong support for the realization of sustainable development goals (Colin and Remmer, 2020), how to effectively implement sustainable factors under the current education model has not been well addressed. The aim of this paper is to research how to formulate training goals and set the related courses using qualitative and quantitative methods
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