LOCAL RESILIENCE STRATEGIES FOR COVID19 – A PBL ENGINEERING CASE STUDY

The increasing relevance of uncertainty and complexity provides ongoing and future challenges for engineers. Subsequently, engineers require competencies such as systems thinking, judgement and decision-making in the face of uncertainty or complex problem solving as part of their education. Already, these are part of e.g. the ABET and EUR-ACE standards and  the CDIO syllabus. This aligns with emerging trends in engineering education, such as student-centred, active learning and problem-project-based learning (PBL). The aim of this paper is to present a seminar teaching concept and to examine to what extent scenario planning combined with active, PBL and collaborative learning can enable engineering students to develop resilience strategies. Here, resilience describes a system’s ability to cope with sudden disturbances by adapting and learning, and resilience strategies represent the ability to design such resilient systems. Based on theoretical concepts of resilience, students had to apply these to a concrete and current problem. Following a PBL approach, an open and ill defined problem was the starting point for a scenario planning project, where the students had to develop a resilience strategy with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic at a local level. The seminar aimed at developing competencies in resilience thinking and systems thinking. Findings showed that the teaching concept successfully enhanced especially these competencies which are characterized by a high level of complexity, such as reflection, analysis and assessment of resilience-related issues.