A FRAMEWORK FOR A SUSTAINABILITY TRANSITION OF TWO ENGINEERING MASTER’S COURSES

Sustainability, as a concept, is permeating most of today’s human activities, including higher education. The increased importance put on sustainability depends largely on the increased awareness of the huge environmental, social, and economic challenges that humanity is currently facing. As is the case with most complex themes, the route towards the application of appropriate actions starts with enlightenment developed within education, where different engineering programs form important subareas. To address this, CDIO Syllabus 3.0 in general, but optional standard 1 in specific, does now to an even greater extent handle sustainability issues. This paper presents a framework that is built upon several key concepts that are strongly related to education for sustainable development (ESD) at the university level, such as key sustainability concepts (as defined by UNESCO), sustainability development goals (as defined by the United Nations) and constructive alignment (as defined by Biggs and Tang). The framework is applied to two engineering master’s courses where sustainability concepts and development goals are integrated and constructively aligned in the learning outcomes, teaching and learning activities, and assessments. Through the analysis of the two courses concerning sustainability, the framework is shown to provide a means for the analysis of how sustainability is currently incorporated in a course, highlight what possible teaching/learning shortcomings exist, and help identify actions that can be taken to overcome these shortcomings. The objective of the framework is thus to support course managers in the development of appropriate actions related to sustainability.