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oa Curricular innovation to integrate sustainability for global grand challenges
- Publisher: Hamad bin Khalifa University Press (HBKU Press)
- Source: QScience Proceedings, Engineering Leaders Conference 2014 on Engineering Education, Aug 2015, Volume 2015, 53
Abstract
Educating future generations of engineers and construction managers who will be well prepared to tackle the sustainability grand challenges in the global context will require a paradigm shift from traditional engineering education. There has been much debate in recent years that traditional engineering education has failed to adequately prepare the graduates to face ever-changing complex and multidisciplinary problems in a sustainable and global context. Thus, an innovative transformation of the curricula is needed to educate future engineering graduates to successfully solve sustainable grand challenges. Not only must they be grounded in the latest technical knowledge and tools, future engineers are expected to have adequate understanding of the societal, economical, and political issues and be able to work in diverse team environment and have excellent communication skills. Furthermore, the future generations of engineers and construction managers should possess a highly developed knowledge of the environmental sustainability. “Education for sustainable development is not an option but a priority,” is the vision of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (2005-2014). It is the guiding principle of this paper to provide an overview of the fundamental concepts that should be integrated within engineering and construction management curricula for sustainability in the context of global grand challenges. The curricula innovation from authors' own individual institutions will be presented as successful examples.
