We are excited to inform you that we are starting work on a Sustainability Toolkit, to be launched around the beginning of 2024. We are grateful to receive support and funding from Siemens and The Royal Academy of Engineering on this project.
There is an urgent need to increase sustainability awareness and skills. This is especially important for Engineering education so that all new graduates are motivated and equipped to tackle the serious sustainability challenges facing the environment and society.
To achieve this the Engineering Professors’ Council (EPC) is developing a toolkit for UK Engineering academics to ensure that sustainability is essential to and fully integrated within the learning of Engineering students. The toolkit will be open source and in time it will be connected with similar projects to create a global resource for Engineering educators.
While many excellent resources explain the sustainability knowledge, skills, and mindsets essential for 21st-century engineers, very few resources exist that support engineering educators to integrate these into their teaching in a comprehensive and effective way.
The aim of this project is to develop and curate a toolkit of resources that help academics explicitly embed sustainability in their day-to-day practice of engineering teaching, and to help make sustainability integral to rather than tangential to engineering learning.
Work has already begun and we are making progress with guidance from our Sustainability Toolkit Steering Group. The steering group is composed of academic, industry, and advocacy leaders who are passionate about sustainability and it will help guide the development of outputs such as those created for the EPC’s Engineering Ethics Toolkit. It will work alongside our project partners, including the Royal Academy of Engineering, Siemens, and the Lemelson Foundation which has supported work on a similar initiative in the US. The project will run from February through December 2023.
We will update you on the progress and look forward to launching the toolkit in 2024.
In the meantime, please take a look at some of the useful resources shared by Siemens:
Siemens has a wide selection of resources which include online courses, case studies, software, and more that can be used to create materials for the Sustainability Toolkit. You will be able to find links to these resources in the accordion tabs. Siemens provides a robust selection of software for students, completely free. Siemens software suite offers a set of tools designed to help you prepare for careers in Industry 4.0. Siemens is committed to empowering the next generation of digital talent. Please follow the link to view this resource: Engineering student software Siemens Digital Industries Software provides free classroom-ready curricular materials for educators. Developed cooperatively by professors at partner universities and Siemens technical experts, these teaching materials can be implemented as-is or integrated with your syllabus. Please follow the link to view this resource: Engineering curriculum materials All active Siemens Digital Industries Software academic customers and partners are entitled to no cost access to Xcelerator Academy, a convenient, easy-to-use e-Learning portal with over 5,000 tutorials and assessments. Please follow the link to view this resource: Xcelerator Academy During this year’s online Siemens Skills for Sustainability Network roundtables, Siemens heard about the pressing need for more and better materials from industry for teaching about sustainability. As an immediate response, Siemens put together four sustainability case studies based on existing Siemens materials, and developed a summary, additional student-oriented resources (reading or video) and a series of questions and assignment prompts. Please follow the link to view this resource: Case studies The Siemens ‘Skills for Sustainability’ survey was launched in November 2022 as a pilot. The objective was to give students a voice in how sustainability is addressed globally in engineering education. Insights from the project leader at Siemens and the student organizations can be found in the panel discussion summary exploring the survey results on page 5 of the report. Please follow the link to view this resource: Survey report Free software downloads for students
Free classroom resources
Free on-demand training
Sustainability case studies
The Student Voice ”Skills for Sustainability” Survey Report
