Competencies for designing resilient systems in engineering education – a content analysis of selected study programs of five European technical universities

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• System resilience
• engineering curriculum
• competence
• content analysis
• common core state standards

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the universities and the IDEA League who supported us in this study and provided us with the necessary documents. We also thank Felix Engelhardt and Clara Lemke for their support and critical questions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ann-Kristin Winkens

Ann-Kristin Winkens, studied environmental engineering (M.Sc.) and is a PhD candidate at the Research Group Gender and Diversity in Engineering (GDE) at the Technical University in Aachen (RWTH) in Germany. Her research is focused on teaching and learning in engineering education, with a specific focus on future skills related to designing resilient systems and training competencies in engineering sciences.

Carmen Leicht-Scholten

Carmen Leicht-Scholten, political scientist by training, is director of the RRI Hub at the Technical University in Aachen (RWTH) in Germany. She is professor for Gender and Diversity in Engineering (GDE) at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Her focus in research and teaching addresses the embeddedness of social factors in research and innovation processes, i.e. the social construction of science and technology (STS). She is engaged in integrating participatory processes as key factor for sustainable transformations in engineering curricula on national and international level, i.e. as deputy member of the German Accreditation Council.