Stand-alone and Interdisciplinary Course Design for Engineering Education for Sustainable Development

In order to embed ESD in the EE curriculum, several approaches has been introduced and practiced in higher education institutions. One of the approaches is to introduce a new ESD course as an add-on to the existing curriculum being either compulsory or elective and either designed for a single discipline or to fit across programmes. At Aalborg University (AAU), Denmark, which has a long tradition of problem based learning (PBL), a comprehensive sustainability course has been introduced to fit all students not at least across programmes but also across faculties of engineering, humanities and social science. At this stage the learning objectives and the course content is stated; whereas the experience from practise is yet to be explored. In this paper we discuss the proposed learning objectives and content of the AAU course based on a conceptual framework for characterising ESD courses and reported examples of other ESD courses of the same kind. The presented conceptual framework is put to practice, characterising the AAU course as a stand-alone interdisciplinary course with a consensual approach. The conclusion is that the conceptual framework can provide an awareness of the design features, which can be related to the overall purpose of the course. The analysis also shows that even among the same type of courses there is divergence in the learning outcomes and the content. Therefore, discussion between course developers and stressing the use of the same type of courses across institutional settings is strongly recommended.