Sustainability, Responsibility and Ethics for Engineers - an Interactive and Transferable Course System

The Blue Engineering course design promotes socially and ecologically responsible engineering through a variety of alternative teaching methods. Engineering students acquire the competence to unveil the complex interdependency of their social, political, ecological and economic surroundings. This includes the consideration of different values, interests and needs within a global perspective as well as within one class(room). The course design encourages democratic decision-making not only to solve but also to define problems within the course itself and moreover outside of the classroom. The course design is successfully implemented at seven universities in Germany reaching over 300 students each semester. This underlines the high adaptability and transferability of the course design. Thus, participants of the workshop will experience first hand a course design that may be easily adapted to any engineering study program. To underline the student-driven approach of the course design, the proposed 40-minute workshop will be conducted entirely by student tutors. As a backup, senior faculty will also attend the workshop which consists of three parts: 1) teaching/learning in practice, 2) implementation of the course design at different universities, 3) adaptation and transferability of the course design to other universities.