AC 2011-2137: EXPERIENCES WHILE INCORPORATING SUSTAINABIL-ITY ENGINEERING INTO THE INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING CURRIC-ULA

According to The Engineer of 2020 (National Academy of Engineering, 2004), to maintain the nation’s economic competitiveness and improve the quality of life for people around the world, engineering educators and curriculum developers must anticipate dramatic changes in engineering practice and adapt their programs accordingly. Current environmental issues have caused society to realize that industries and individuals must have sustainable systems to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). Therefore, one of the main goals of the present paper is to show how sustainability engineering curriculum has been included into the Industrial Engineering curricula to respond to current demands to produce environmentally conscious engineers capable of understanding sustainable practices and their implications. For the authors, creating a special topics class for the new course within the industrial engineering department seemed very appropriate since industrial engineering has always focused in the optimization of resources, thus there is a natural connection between the sustainability definition and what industrial engineers have always practiced. The main objective of this paper is to present the approach used to integrate sustainability engineering content into the engineering curriculum at our University. The approach involves offering a multidisciplinary class in sustainability engineering which was offered to junior or senior engineering students as a technical elective class with no prerequisites. The class was divided in four main modules which are Life Cycle Assessment, Energy Management, Design for Sustainability, and Ethical Consumerism. A team teaching approach was used to teach the class with faculty members from the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial, Manufacturing and Systems Engineering Department. In the class, students were required to work in teams to solve two different projects. The first project was mainly related to life cycle assessment (LCA) in which students were asked to perform an LCA for a particular product and provide an analysis of their results. The second project involved a presentation to expand one of the main modules of the class. Finally, the course was evaluated using student questionnaires and exit interviews. Moreover, one additional survey was sent to the students six months after they took the class to collect data and assess student learning.