Engineering Service Learning with Green Information Technology and Systems Projects

Abstract

It is well established that university engineering students are capable of concrete contributions to sustainable development while improving their academic skills by undertaking service learning (SL) projects tailored for the content of the course. These SL projects can normally be classified as: 1) collaborations with a community group or non-profit organization to provide specific engineering design or construction around a community need, or 2) an internship-like experience with industry in which students provide solicited work for a client. The limitation of both of these approaches is that they do not prepare students to implement projects that are not prescribed. This paper presents the findings for a novel pedagogical exercise in which students were assigned SL projects in which they were to act as change agents for industry by implementing unsolicited energy conservation measures (ECMs) to improve the environmental performance of an organization. These ECMs focused on green information technology and systems (IT/S) SL projects, which were integrated into a 4 year mechanical engineering elective in engineering for sustainable development. The projects were broken into two components – a virtual and a real SL project. For the virtual component, the students used Appropedia.org, an appropriate technology wiki, to coordinate the five member teams and to develop and publish ECMs utilizing green IT/S. The ECMs created by students were constructed from templates, which had been developed by a multi-disciplinary team made up of representatives from economics, engineering, environmental studies, and management information systems. The ECMs were then open sourced and made available for any organization to use to economically and environmentally justify improvements in IT/S. For the second component, the student teams self-selected industry clients and obtained permission to perform IT/S energy audits of the organizations. After performing the audits, the teams selected among the ECMs developed by the class to make recommendations to the organizations. Preliminary results are presented and discussed and conclusions are drawn on the effectiveness of such hybridization projects to SL in engineering.