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While post-graduate sustainable programs have been very well developed in universities, until recently, baccalaureate education in sustainability has been largely underrepresented. With the success of the post-graduate programs in a wide range of individual sustainable development areas, such as environmental sustainability, sustainable manufacturing, infrastructure sustainability, etc. the time seems appropriate for creating a baccalaureate program in Sustainable Systems Engineering (SSE) which can form a pipeline of students educated from a systems perspective in sustainable engineering practices that will feed into post graduate programs, as well as fill a need in government and industry. The baccalaureate SSE will focus on more general and multidisciplinary areas of sustainable engineering systems to prepare students for future sustainable development challenges. This paper studies three major aspects of the development of the baccalaureate SSE program at the Metropolitan State University of Denver: (a) Necessity of SSE, (b) Objectives and (c) Curriculum Development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article demonstrates the use of cmaps for assessing student sustainability knowledge, to aid in the design and evaluation of strategies for incorporating sustainability into engineering curricula. Topics discussed include the case study conducted to quantify the sustainability knowledge of civil and environmental engineering (CEE) seniors at the Georgia Institute of Technology using cmaps and the differences in sustainability knowledge between civil and environmental engineering majors.

Equipping engineering students with the skills and knowledge required to be successful global engineers in the 21st century is one of the primary objectives of undergraduate educators. Enabling students to practice self-directed learning, to find solutions to design problems that are sustainable to the application requirements, to have appropriate skills and knowledge, as well as the familiarity of the modern software packages, tools and equipment used in today industries are major goals of all engineering or engineering technology programs. This paper presents how the uses of HOMER (Hybrid Optimization Model for Electric Renewable) software package can be a valuable tool for renewable energy education (design, modeling and analysis of renewable energy systems). However, today there are quite a few programs for the renewable energy design, analysis and modeling. Some of them are more complexes, others user-friendlies, while others too simple. Here, this software package has been considered to have all the features and tools necessarily to make a good option, while being not too complicated and complex for undergraduate engineering or engineering technology students with limited or not previous knowledge in the areas of renewable energy systems. HOMER optimization software package can be used for design, model and analysis to determine the optimal architecture, structure, size and control strategy of the hybrid power system. It can perform comparative economic and modeling analysis on a distributed generation power system in order to get the best solution in terms of cost, performances, size and structure. Several educational modules were developed, are in process or planned to be developed. The first developed module is about how to use, interact and understand with HOMER software package. Other modules are focusing on how design, analyze and optimize hybrid power systems (implying various combinations of wind, solar, fuel cells and batteries). A module underway to be developed is one that can be considered as a guide on how to use renewable energy to secure a sustainable grid. The paper is also discussing the technical skills gained by students using the software HOMER package. Finally by using HOMER students have exposure to non-technical engineering skills, such as economic feasibility, logistic and decision on hybrid power systems. We are hoping the materials presented herein can be used as the starting point for other instructors considering the use of HOMER package as teaching help, design and analysis tool in renewable energy courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An educational institution is defined by its faculty; student intake and infrastructure are largely dependent on the faculty. Any educational system, therefore, has to focus on educating the faculty on an ongoing basis. While ample research has been reported on the requirements of the 21st century engineers, its deployment is not satisfactory, especially in the Indian engineering education system. This has to be addressed as India is endowed with impressive demographic dividend, as compared to many developed economies and is poised to become a major workforce supplier in the coming decades. Being of Indian origin with international experience, we have designed, developed and delivered a two-day workshop for educating the educators in the emerging Indian economy. The objectives of the workshop were a) to introduce the participants to the changing needs of engineering education, and b) to illustrate an approach that we have developed over the past decade to address the needs. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of the workshop. The context of the workshop is set by Richard Riley's beautifully articulated statement: "we are currently preparing students for jobs that don't exist using technologies that haven't been invented in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet". While we cannot list technologies and problems; we can envision some basic themes around which the future may revolve. To enable a focused discussion of topics, we imagine a future in which individuals are empowered to participate in the global value network where geographically distributed people (including engineers) collaboratively develop, build, and test solutions to complex socio-technoeco problems in wired and interconnected world. We posit that to be successful in the future, our engineering students need to be empowered to develop white-space competencies and learn to realize sustainable engineering systems. The workshop was designed to be highly interactive. We used a model course developed over the past 15 years, which embodies threshold concepts such as the 'question for the semester' (Q4S), self-evaluation and learning communities, relying on developing competencies to fulfill the learning objectives, etc. The model course embedded all the concepts espoused in the workshop. The approach was based on the principles from mass customization and competency-based learning rather than one-size-fits-all content delivery. The workshop started with identifying competencies and meta-competencies required for the 21st century Indian engineers. Methods for identifying white-space competencies, dilemmas and managing them were discussed. The participants discussed many issues such as developing the Q4S for educating the 21st century Indian engineer and concluded with the course that they would like to develop with the concepts learnt in the workshop. The participant pool consisted of 32 Indian educators from different parts of the country. The workshop received positive feedback and the participants went back with a resolve to deploy the knowledge that they acquired at least in a course. The paper includes the design, implementation, and key learning of the authors from the workshop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses research which examined the four factors impacting ideation flexibility of engineering students. Topics discussed include the development of a sustainable foundation, the definition of ideation flexibility and its importance in engineering, the relationship between cognitive style and preferred ideation behavior or outcomes, the impact of problem framing on ideation flexibility and the impacts of the other factors like ideation tools and ideation teaming.

The article presents insights on the community projects of engineering students of Baylor University in various developing countries. Topics discussed include the solar project in Haiti in 2013, the sustainable school project at Sonrise School in Musanze, Rwanda, and the small scale hydroelectric system they created in Honduras.