INTERNATIONAL COORDINATION OF A FIRST-YEAR COURSE ON SUSTAINABILITY IN ENGINEERING DESIGN

Abstract

A growing trend in the recruitment of undergraduate students to engineering programs atCanadian universities is to establish an international presence at a branch campus in a different part of the world. This paper focuses on an example case study of the international collaboration of an introductory engineering course called “Sustainability in Engineering Design” between the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) and the Universities of Canada (UofCanada-Cairo) inCairo, Egypt. This course set out as being foundational in the implementation of an identical, international offering of the UPEI Faculty of Sustainable Design Engineering’s (FSDE) Bachelor of Science in Sustainable Design Engineering (BSc-SDE) program at the Cairo campus. This paper describes the implementation of the course at the branch (UofCanada-Cairo) campus and the coauthors, as instructors, provide a self-assessment of the success of the coordination to deliver the learning outcomes for the course. An assessment of how well the main graduate attributes (i.e. GA9: Impact on Society and Environment; GA6: Individual and Team Work, and GA13:Lifelong Learning) linked to the course’s learning outcomes were achieved in developing a sustainability mindset in UPEI FSDE undergraduate students will be presented and recommendations for the course in the context of international collaboration will be discussed.The projects' assessment also affirms that students at both campuses can work in teams to evaluate the impact of current engineering designs on society and environment and design more sustainable products in the future.