Teaching Sustainable Engineering Ten Years Later: What’s Worked & What’s Next?

Teaching environmentally related courses in environmental engineering and mechanical engineering technology curricula at two institutions has generated a wealth of experiences. Design for the Environment at the associate level, Design for Society at the senior level, and Sustainable Engineering at the graduate level are similar, complementary courses. Topics in each include green engineering and environmentally-conscious manufacturing. Environmental awareness discussions are included to make clear the perspective of why engineering students need to learn about green design. The writing components in each course are more involved than those in other engineering courses. Whereas each course has undergone student and faculty assessments, an accounting of the results reveals similarities and differences in student reactions to environmentally considerate material. This paper includes numerical analysis of student assessments and faculty reviews for the purpose of measuring progress towards common objectives. The paper also discusses qualitative data for understanding the direction sustainable engineering education might take. This analysis becomes useful when making changes to existing courses and plans for future ones by identifying what has worked well and what has not. Sustainable engineering While the definition of sustainable development traces to the Brundtland Commission in 1989, a working one for sustainable engineering continues to evolve. The Centre for Sustainable Engineering defines the term as “Engineering technologies and services which deliver greater resource productivity or efficiency and fewer emissions of hazardous substances and/or emissions presenting lower hazards.” Considering greater productivity and efficiency in resource use is not a new concept to design engineers. However, the increased awareness of hazardous emissions and their effects is. As the definition of sustainable engineering has evolved, so has the engineering coursework. Two similar courses at different institutions began in 1995 and 1996. The first, Engineering (ENGR) 271, Design for the Environment, became a requirement of an associate-degree program in mechanical engineering technology (MET). According to the catalog description, the course “examines the effects of progress and advances in technology on the global environment. Product design and manufacturing processes are studied for their effects on the environment.” In the following year, the second institution added the course Engineering Technology (ET) 420, Design for Society, to its bachelor-level program in mechanical engineering technology. Its description is, “an interdisciplinary study of the engineering design process and the influence of society and culture on design.” Although a technical elective initially, the course is required today. In 2001 that same institution added an upper-level course for its senior and graduate students. Environmental Engineering (ENVE) 430, Sustainable Engineering, is a technical elective accepted in a variety of engineering and engineering technology programs. Its description is “a course on engineering which uses ecological principles to minimize waste and P ge 11226.2 maximally use input materials.” Since the 1970s, students from the associates program transfer to the second institution to pursue the bachelors degree in MET. That transition continues today, so the three related courses coexist. ENGR 271 is accepted in place of the required ET 420. Although they are not prerequisites, students completing either design course are well prepared to take ENVE 430 as an elective. Table 1 contains data related to the sections of the courses that were taught during this study period. The numbers of sections and numbers of student, both maximum and minimum give an idea as to the total students who experienced sustainability-related courses. Also included in the table are the course percentages for how grades were distributed across each of the courses. Course ENGR 271 ET 420 ENVE 430 Number of sections 6 2 3 Maximum number of students 21 47 22 Minimum number of students 10 22 6 Exam percentage 40% 40% 30% Homework percentage 15% Written assignment percentage 20% 20% Team project percentage 35% 30% 50% Class participation percentage 5% 10% 5% Table 1 Number of Sections and Students with Course Percentages for the Study Period ENGR 271 and ET 420 each began as interdisciplinary approaches to engineering design. Since the global environment and its community are themselves diverse, interdisciplinary study of them is the best approach to understanding their interactions. Sustainable engineering assumes that engineers will continue to provide technologies and services to the global community. Doing so with objectives of resource efficiency and emission reduction is what makes engineers’ actions sustainable. Results from student assessments As different as the two institutions are, their standardized student assessments of teaching are also different. The two-year institution uses the Student Evaluation of Educational Quality (SEEQ), which is a 40-item survey using a 5-point scale that can be machine scored or webbased. SEEQ items are standardized over the institution making it easier for instructors to compare their results versus those of their colleagues. In the Design for the Environment course, students generally considered having “learned something valuable” at an above-average level when compared to all their college courses. In 2001, the course was delivered on line, which may have caused the rating of value to drop slightly below the college average. In the same assessment, students ranked Design for the Environment consistently higher overall than the average institution course. The other institution uses a Student Rating of Teaching Effectiveness (SRTE). Two rating items for ET 420W for the Spring 2004 & 2005 semesters were content related. Students rated “the P ge 11226.3 overall quality of the course” almost identically each year, using a 7-point scale. Students rated “the importance of knowledge learned in the course” slightly lower in one semester and higher in the other. Students completing the SRTE forms have the option of answering open-ended questions including, “What did you like best about this course,” and “What did you like least about this course?” Since the W suffix indicates that the course meets the university writing-intensive requirement, the writing requirements exceed those of many engineering technology courses. Students answering what they liked least were consistent in both semesters in saying there was too much writing required. In terms of course content, some students liked the presentation of facts related to environmental impact. Some students were disappointed in that the course emphasized the motivations for design rather than design criteria itself as in other engineering courses. ENVE 497A was the pre-approved version of ENVE 430. Results for Fall 2002 and 2003 were available, but the course was cancelled for low enrollment in Fall 2004, and SRTE results for the Fall 2005 offering of ENVE 430 were unavailable as this writing. Two of the 17 SRTE rating items for ENVE 497A were course content related. Although the rating improved by almost one-half a point on the seven-point scale for the item “Rate the overall quality of the course,” from 2002 to 2003, the final rating was below expectations. There was a greater increase of more than 1 point for the item, “Rate the importance of the knowledge learned in this course,” from 2002 to 2003. The ratings for this second item were higher than the first in both semesters showing that students recognized the importance of the course material even if they did not rate the quality of the course highly. Results from student and faculty assessments of course learning objectives Aside from college-wide standardized assessment, program faculty developed a tool to have students and faculty members judge how each class accomplished meeting its course objectives. Both students and faculty respond to a minimum of ten statements pertaining to the written and supporting course objectives. For each class, the instructor averages the students’ responses and compares them to his/her own. A program faculty committee reviews all such assessments to see where the student average differs from the faculty member’s response by more than 1 point on the 5-point scale. Also, the committee identifies those student averages that are below 3.0. Although the faculty responses might vary with each section of a course, the student responses, when compared from year to year, indicate if an objective is not being met, which results in the committee recommending corrective actions. Course objective assessments were done in 2004 and 2005 for ET 420W. As part of the assessment, students also respond to open-ended questions including, “What did you enjoy most in this course,” and “What did you enjoy least?” In ET 420W, students responded that they liked discussions and projects relating to environmental impact and learning about sustainability with its social and cultural interactions. They disliked writing about some topics and doing the team project. P ge 11226.4 Responding to the open-ended questions in the ENVE 430 assessment, students liked talking about sustainability and associated topics, such as energy efficiency and resource conservation. Students did not enjoy homework based on some topics, specifically because problems were vague sometimes. Also, one graduate student in the class suggested that more modeling of problem solutions would be helpful. The students split on the benefits of the semester-long life cycle analysis (LCA) project. Two negative issues raised were that they didn’t like being paired together for the team project and that the project was a significant work load in a one-semester course.