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Future engineering professionals have to deal with increasing complexity and uncertainty, as global challenges, such as climate change, globalisation and digitalisation, require creative, innovative solutions and interdisciplinary perspectives. Accordingly, engineering graduates have to be prepared to deal with those kinds of problems at different levels. Coping with uncertain and highly complex problems as well as learning from them is referred to as resilience. However, it is not well understood how and to what concern resilience is discussed in engineering education. Therefore, this systematic literature review aims to clarify meanings, definitions and applications of resilience within engineering education. We reviewed 67 research articles and found that resilience in engineering education is either linked to engineering students as a personal attribute or to systems, in this case describing a teaching content. Moreover, the concept of resilience was seldomly defined and explained, indicating that future research should put greater emphasis on doing so.

Climate change increases the risk of natural disasters, which requires the design of sustainable and resilient infrastructure. This implies a need to enable engineering students to deal with highly complex problems and uncertainty. These competencies refer to the concept of resilience, describing the ability of a system to adapt to threatening events and to learn from failure. In this study, we investigated if and if so, how far resilience-related competencies are addressed within engineering study programs. Based on a content analysis, the learning outcomes from 48 study programs of five leading technical universities in Europe were analysed. The results indicate a lack of both resilience-related competencies within engineering programs and a consistent implementation of learning outcomes within the European Higher Education Area. Accordingly, future engineering professionals need to be more extensively educated to design resilient systems and higher education institutions need to purposefully embed these abilities in their study programs.

Introducing engineering students to topics of social responsibility and sustainability in the field of science and technology studies is internationally discussed, but there is little common consensus on best practices. Especially in large and mandatory engineering courses, initiating reflection processes among the students imposes difficulties on lecturers. The lecture "Engineering and Society" is attended each year by about 500 engineering students at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. Intended to familiarize engineering students with central theories and topics in the field of science and technology studies as well as sustainability and responsibility, the lecture creates a contrast to the highly technical engineering contents in these study programs. To increase the accessibility of these topics for students, a detailed teaching concept was developed by the authors which is reviewed in this paper. The paper proposes this approach for teaching sustainability and responsibility to engineering students in a large mandatory bachelor's course as well as raising awareness for their own responsibility while maintaining focus on the academic content of the lecture. The paper aims to answer the following research questions: How to teach sustainability and responsibility to engineering students in a large mandatory bachelor's course? How to raise awareness for personal responsibility as engineering students? Challenges and possible solutions related to the academic content of sustainability and responsibility are discussed based on evaluation outcomes and lecturers' experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The master's seminar "Competencies for Social and Sustainable Engineering Design" at RWTH Aachen University is part of the study programs Environmental Engineering, Civil Engineering and Industrial Engineering. Focusing on Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), this course covers, teaches and reflects relevant competencies for socially responsible and sustainable engineering design. Following a research-orientated focus, the following research question was addressed: "Which competencies are considered relevant by future engineers in the context of sustainable and socially responsible engineering design?". The purpose of this paper is to present this approach and, on the basis of the seminar, to explain how relevant competencies for socially responsible and sustainable engineering design can be acquired by engineers. Moreover, the seminar concept is explained and a methodology for teaching the aforementioned topics is described that can also be transferred to other courses. The evaluation of course-specific feedback allows to present both conclusions and corresponding solution approaches, as well as challenges associated with the concept. Results show that engineering students call for competencies which go beyond pure technical knowledge, and, at the same time, determine that these competencies, like social competencies, are missing in their studies. Accordingly, this leads to implications for future curricula development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]