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This paper aims to analyze the presence of sustainability in 16 Spanish higher education curricula in the fields of education and engineering.

The methodology uses two instruments: sustainability map and sustainability presence map. These instruments enable analysis of the number of subjects that develop sustainability and the sustainability presence level in each curriculum; identification of what domain levels of the learning taxonomy sustainability is most developed; and analysis of whether a correlation exists between the sustainability presence and the number of subjects that develop sustainability in each curriculum.

A wide variety of subjects develop sustainability in a given degree, depending on the university. The presence of sustainability is more homogeneous in education degrees than in engineering degrees. Education degrees have a greater presence of sustainability in the lower domain levels of taxonomy, while in engineering degrees the lower levels of taxonomy have a lower presence of sustainability than the higher levels. Finally, a correlation appears to exist between the number of subjects that develop sustainability in the curriculum and the sustainability presence. However, engineering degrees seem to need fewer subjects than education degrees to achieve the same degree of sustainability presence.

This paper proposes a methodology to measure sustainability presence that can be applicable to the curricula of a higher education degree if the corresponding sustainability map is available. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the largest study yet conducted to analyze the presence of sustainability in different higher education curricula.

Literature limited in scope regarding the incorporation of sustainability into engineering curriculum encouraged authors to look at the current approaches of universities to the integration of sustainability into university curricula. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the literature published and analyse the university secondary data (information published on the university websites and magazines and programme catalogues) to understand the current status of Australian universities regarding the integration of sustainability in engineering.

Articles and reports from different trustworthy sources have been analysed in this study. A text mining methodology was used to gather information from websites, magazines and programme catalogues.

Obtained information and data indicate that the universities are considering sustainability seriously with both internal and external stakeholders of universities working towards embedding sustainability in engineering curricula. Most of the Australian universities have successfully implemented sustainable engineering education and the rest are focussing on integrating sustainability into their engineering education curriculum.

This is the first review, which focusses on incorporating sustainability into the engineering education of Australian universities. However, considering current progress and also some drawbacks of the universities regarding the integration of sustainability into engineering curriculum, 15 future research questions have been developed, which should be considered to make the integration process more efficient and equip engineers who would be able to engage and tackle the environmental, personal, social and economic challenges of the twenty-first century.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a consistent and systematic integration framework of sustainable development (SD) in a civil engineering (CE) curriculum, given the connection between the two. Curriculum integration is a challenging project and requires the development of certain protocols to ensure success.

This paper thus proposes a framework for the systematic integration of SD through the lenses of life cycle approach and associated tools to attain effective curriculum integration. The proposed framework suggests the following five steps: mapping the curriculum, setting learning targets, developing an action plan for the assessed program, implementing the action plan and assessing the final performance.

This framework was applied to the CE curriculum at Sherbrooke University. To assess its success, a student satisfaction survey was conducted, and teachers’ feedback was obtained; the results showed 85 per cent positive responses. The authors show how this study allowed the CE curriculum to be properly updated and brought in line with today’s engineering profession requirements with regard to SD.

The integration focuses on the application of life cycle approaches and tools such as environmental life cycle assessment and life cycle costing on CE content. Additionally, the presented approach can be easily adapted to other engineering curriculums and, to a certain extent, to other non-engineering curriculums.

Education for sustainable development (ESD) is one of the challenges engineering education currently faces. Engineering education needs to revise and change its curriculum to integrate ESD principles and knowledge. Problem based learning (PBL) has been one of the main learning pedagogies used to integrate sustainability in engineering education. However, there is a lack of understanding of the relation between ESD and PBL principles and the ways in which they can be integrated and practised in the engineering curricula. This paper aims to investigate the relation between PBL and ESD and the ways in which they are integrated and practised in the engineering curricula.

The study starts with a review of the literature concerning ESD and PBL theories where relations between both are defined. The literature review is followed by an empirical work in which the PBL and ESD relations are investigated in relation to the PBL engineering curricula. The empirical work involves two engineering master programmes from Aalborg University, Denmark, while documentary analysis and interviews are used as methods for data collection.

The results show that even though PBL and ESD share common learning principles, their practice presents limitations that challenge the full integration of sustainability, namely, the crowded, strict and academic-centred curriculum, the struggle to balance different contexts with professional, interdisciplinary and collaborative knowledge and the tacit presence of sustainability.

The existence of a PBL curriculum at institutional level, such as at Aalborg University, enables investigation of how the PBL and ESD principles are practised, highlighting the limitations and potentials of integrating sustainability in the engineering curriculum.

The purpose of this paper is to present the case for engineering departments to undertake rapid curriculum renewal (RCR) towards engineering education for sustainable development (EESD), to minimise the department's risk exposure to rapidly shifting industry requirements, government regulations and program accreditation. This paper then outlines a number of elements of RCR.

This paper begins by proposing that Higher Education Institutions face a “time lag dilemma,” whereby the usual or “standard” curriculum renewal approach to embed new knowledge and skills within the curriculum may take too long, lagging behind industry, regulatory, and accreditation shifts. This paper then outlines a proposed RCR approach. This paper presents a number of preliminary “elements of RCR” formulated from a literature review of numerous existing but largely ad hoc examples of curriculum renewal within engineering and other discipline areas, together with the authors' experience in trialling the elements.

This paper concludes that a strategically implemented process of curriculum renewal to EESD can help a department address its risk exposure to likely and impending shifts in industry, regulations and accreditation. A number of examples of implementing “elements of RCR” are emerging and this literature can inform a strategic approach to curriculum renewal.

The aim of this paper is to highlight the potential risks and opportunities for engineering departments as they consider “how far” and “how fast” to proceed with curriculum renewal for EESD, along with providing an overview of a range of options for implementation.

This paper fulfils an identified information/resources need.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of applying sustainability to the engineering curriculum at a university in China.

A new curriculum, “ethics, involvement and sustainability,” was designed and presented to engineering students from an undergraduate major in quality management engineering. This curriculum incorporated knowledge acquisition and skills training into sustainability via various teaching approaches in a mandatory curriculum at Tongling University, China. Pre- and post-questionnaire surveys, as well as a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model, were adopted to evaluate the changes in knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of respondents before and after curriculum implementation.

Significant changes in knowledge and attitudes were observed following the implementation of the curriculum. In terms of the development of new behaviors, the changes tended to be moderate. Generally, respondents were satisfied with the effectiveness of the new interdisciplinary curriculum post-implementation.

Positive results were observed for the pilot and practice of the new engineering education (NEE) strategy at the cooperating university in China. Specifically, the integration of sustainability into curriculum design, implementation and evaluation inspired greater social responsibility in engineering students’ decision-making processes. Additionally, it shed light on how to integrate the concept of sustainability into curricula. One limitation of this study was the absence of a comparison group that did not experience the new curriculum.

Scant attention has been paid to local universities in the context of the newly-launched NEE strategy. This study provides new insight regarding the implementation of sustainability into engineering curricula and practice via formal, but diversified, teaching approaches.

The purpose of this study is to present an assessment of the sustainability content of the Nigerian engineering curriculum in universities.

Content analysis is used to generate and analyse data from three engineering documents, namely, the Benchmark Minimum Academic Standards for Engineering Programmes in Nigeria and the engineering handbooks of two Nigerian higher education institutions.

The Nigerian engineering curriculum is revealed to have a low sustainability content, with environmental concepts being the most cited themes and social topics as the least stated issues.

The sustainability assessment approach adopted in the study is constrained by the question of what constitutes a sustainability syllabus. Expert-derived sustainability themes used in the study are unavoidably incomplete and may limit the conduct of an exhaustive sustainability content assessment.

Based on the research outcome, the Council for the Regulation of Engineering in Nigeria and other stakeholders can consider ways to adequately incorporate sustainability themes in the Nigerian engineering curriculum.

The research is an effort to determine the presence of sustainability issues in the Nigerian engineering education, which has hitherto been scarcely documented. This study provides a baseline and a rationale for sustainability education interventions in the Nigerian engineering curriculum. It also presents a methodology for analysing sustainability content in university curriculum and contributes to the continuing sustainability education discourse, especially in relation to sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper aims to present key findings from an inquiry into engineering accreditation and curricula renewal. The research attempted to ascertain conceptions of requisite sustainability themes among engineering academics and professionals. The paper also reflects on the potential role of professional engineering institutions (PEIs) in embedding sustainability through their programme accreditation guidelines and wider implications in terms of rapid curricula renewal.

This research comprised an International Engineering Academic Workshop held during the 2010 International Symposium on Engineering Education in Ireland, on “accreditation and sustainable engineering”. This built on the findings of a literature review that was distributed prior to the workshop. Data collection included individual questionnaires administered during the workshop, and notes scribed by workshop participants.

The literature review highlighted a wide range of perspectives across and within engineering disciplines, regarding what sustainability/sustainable development (SD) themes should be incorporated into engineering curricula, and regarding language and terminology. This was also reflected in the workshop discussions. Notwithstanding this diversity, clusters of sustainability themes and priority considerations were distilled from the literature review and workshop. These related to resources, technology, values, ethics, inter‐ and intra‐generational equity, transdisciplinarity, and systems and complex thinking. Themes related to environmental and economic knowledge and skills received less attention by workshop participants than represented in the literature.

This paper provides an appreciation of the diversity of opinion regarding priority sustainability themes for engineering curricula, among a group of self‐selected engineering academics who have a common interest in education for SD. It also provides some insights and caveats on how these themes might be rapidly integrated into engineering curricula.

The most recent alteration in engineering technology education in South Africa is the establishment of a new degree qualification – Bachelor of Engineering Technology. The new qualification standards alone do not give a clear distinction between knowers in the engineering technician and engineering technologist categories. This lack of clarity about what knower the new programme is intended to produce is a stumbling block to educators who need to plan, develop and implement the new curriculum. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise the intended knower dispositions for the new programme by carrying out a comparative analysis with the existing programme, thereby assisting curriculum designers particularly with development of effective scaffolding for engineering technology students.

In this paper, the authors conceptualise the intended knower dispositions for the new programme by carrying out a comparative analysis of the current and new exit-level outcomes. Each of the qualifications for the engineering technology programmes are comprehensively interpreted and analysed in this paper. This paper uses Bloom’s taxonomy and Luckett’s knowledge plane as lenses to perform the analysis and draw a distinction between knowers in the engineering technician and engineering technologist categories.

The analysis used in this paper suggests that the engineering technologist category exhibits a relative shift towards subjective and theoretical “ways of knowing”. It is found that the shift from practical ways of knowing to theoretical will evoke a shift from contextual to conceptual knowledge. The authors also flesh out how this shift could influence the new curriculum particularly with regard to developing effective scaffolding for engineering technology students. A useful tool for mapping these shifts in knowing is also established in this paper.

The most recent alteration in engineering technology education in South Africa is the establishment of the new Bachelor of Engineering Technology qualification. This qualification marks a paradigm shift in the nature of engineering technology education itself. In this paper, this paradigm shift is conceptualised. It is expected that the interpretation of the new qualification standards, and the influence of the shift in intended knower and exit-level outcomes on curriculum will be grappled with by engineering technology educators in South Africa in the coming years, as the new programmes are established around the country. This conceptual paper is significant because it marks the first work towards grappling these crucial and forthcoming issues in the country.

Advancements and innovation in engineering design are based on learning from previous failures but students are encouraged to “succeed” first time and hence can avoid learning from failure in practice. The purpose of this paper is to design and evaluate a curriculum to help engineering design students to learn from failure.

A new curriculum design provided a case study for evaluating the effects of incorporating learning from failure within a civil engineering course. An analysis of the changes in course output was undertaken in relation to graduate destination data covering 2006 to 2016 and student satisfaction from 2012 to 2017 and a number of challenges and solutions for curriculum designers were identified.

The design and delivery of an innovative curriculum, within typical constraints, can provide opportunities for students to develop resilience to failure as an integral part of their learning in order to think creatively and develop novel engineering solutions. The key issues identified were: the selection of appropriate teaching methods, creating an environment for exploratory learning, group and team assessments with competitive elements where practicable and providing students with many different pedagogical approaches to produce a quality learning experience.

This case study demonstrates how to design and implement an innovative curriculum that can produce positive benefits of learning from failure. This model can be applied to other disciplines such as building surveying and construction management. This approach underpins the development of skills necessary in the educational experience to develop as a professional building pathologist.