Perspectives for International Engineering Education: Sustainable-oriented and Transnational Teaching and Learning

Abstract

A global transformation from an economic towards a sustainable development is promoted by current policies from the United Nations and the European Union. Young engineers must be trained to anticipate the sustainability challenges for contributing bottom-up to a global sustainable development. Besides, they must be capable of performing in a more and more dynamic, transnational, and intercultural global working environment. Consequently, new perspectives for teaching and learning in higher engineering education are required, providing the competencies for coping with the sustainability challenges and for working within the dynamic global society. A transnational and project-oriented teaching and learning framework is outlined, which provides the future key competencies for young engineers. Based on this framework, the inter-university master course “European Engineering Team” is presented. The master course fosters the development of sustainable and entrepreneurial initiatives by leading the students through the development phases of a start-up company grounding on a sustainable innovation. A first evaluation of the master course shows, that most of the students’ key competencies have been improved significantly.