Social and ecological responsibility within engineering education. A modular student-driven course design that is implemented at seven German universities

Abstract

The Blue Engineering Course is a student-initiated course design that addresses the social and ecological responsibility of engineering. Its student-driven character is achieved through a set of over 150 building blocks, these are well-documented teaching/learning units which are freely available online. The course consists of three parts so that the students gradually acquire the competences to co-conduct and co-develop the course: 1) Students get to know high quality building blocks conducted by a lecturer/student tutors; 2) Students conduct existing building blocks; 3) Students develop new building blocks, conduct them and document them for future use.The design of the Blue Engineering Course has been implemented at Technische Universität Berlin since 2011. Here, over 100 students participated in 18 consecutive semesters. The course design is also successfully adapted and implemented at six other universities in Germany. In total, four exemplary implementations are presented and than analyzed with regard to the transferability and success factors of its implementation.