Sustainable Development, Technological and Industrial Impacts on Engineering Education

• Main Authors: Amr Elsaadani, Ahmed Helmi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Croatian Interdisciplinary Society 2018-06-01
• Series: Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems
• Subjects: sustainable development; teaching methodology; learning outcomes; ICT; IoT
• Online Access: http://indecs.eu/2018/indecs2018-pp227-237.pdf

The past industrial revolutions had negative effects on our world especially on environmental and social aspects. Hence, our societies must be able to steer the continued industrial revolution into the direction of sustainability. In particular, the current industrial revolution relies on the technologies of the Internet of Things, which open the ways to the development of sustainable solutions in order to meet the needs of the present without compromising the needs of the future. In the transition towards a sustainable society, teaching sustainability is necessary to ensure sustainable design and preserve the ecosystem. Consequently, educating engineering students on sustainable development is wide spreading and is actually taking place worldwide in many modern faculties and universities. This article examines the teaching methods for a sustainability subject and builds on the experience of others and a wide spectrum of methods in order to provide guidelines for curriculum design. The design is based on innovations in technologies to cover sustainability along with environmental and social implications. The article also provides a criterion for evaluating the impact of executing the proposed sustainable development curriculum.