Education for Sustainable Development the RAEng pilot course unit

The coming together of a number of initiatives provided a springboard for an innovative pilot programme ineducation for sustainable development. For some time problem-based learning has gathered momentum as anapproach to educating professionals. More recently, there has been a burgeoning interest in inter-disciplinaryapproaches to the complex societal and environmental issues that face the world as a whole. At the same time, professional engineering institutions have been reflecting on appropriate approaches to the education anddevelopment of future engineers. Building on work already undertaken by some of the authors, the RoyalAcademy of Engineering sponsored an inter-disciplinary pilot programme in sustainable development for engineers and scientists. The pilot was innovative not only in its inter-disciplinary approach to sustainabledevelopment but also in its approach to the development of the curriculum. Multi-disciplinary exercises weredesigned that enabled a contextual, active, collaborative and cumulative approach to learning. The assessmentwas also designed to align to the learning approach. Evaluation of the pilot programme suggests that it was wellreceived by the students, and the post-doctoral researchers who acted as facilitators, and also that there were gainsin both understanding of the issues and also in deep approaches to learning.