Integration of Sustainable Design and Circular Economy Concepts in Civil Engineering Curricula (SUSTAIN – CE) Project is co-funded by European Commission and Turkish National Agency (TNA) within the Erasmus+ programme in the amount of EUR 254,412.00.

CONTEXT

Infrastructure is the backbone of sustainable development and forms much of the foundation for quality of life. However, it consumes vast material resources and energy. Hence, educating todays’ prospective engineers, who will design, construct, and maintain these systems for the next 50 or more years; with the awareness and knowledge of sustainable infrastructure design is critical in achieving a sustainable quality of life for generations to come.

Civil engineering covers a wide range of disciplines that incorporates infrastructures: construction, environmental, geotechnical, water resources, structural and transportation engineering. Therefore, it is imperative civil engineering undergraduate students get accustomed to concepts and principles needed to meet the requirements of sustainability in complex civil engineering projects. The curricula of civil engineering undergraduate programs in Europe focus mainly on safety, regulations, standards, codes, and security of infrastructure systems and lack societal and environmental impacts, sustainability, resilience concepts in the various stages of the design process.

As a response, this project will develop an undergraduate civil engineering curriculum that covers sustainable infrastructure design to ensure graduates have the ability to apply concepts and principles of sustainability to the solution of complex civil engineering projects. In order to achieve this objective, SUSTAIN-CE will lead to and test innovative curricula in Turkey, Greece, Portugal and Spain by blending context-specific driven skill gap mitigation with globally benchmarked practices in true co-creation with industry, industry associations, policy makers, end-users and academia. This will be further multiplied and sustained through a digital and fully open platform towards boosting open learning in the above mentioned context.

GOAL

SUSTAIN-CE Project will attempt to enrich the contemporary civil engineering undergraduate programs’ curricula by incorporating sustainability, resilience and circular economy concepts in various stages of the design courses.

ACTIVITIES OVERVIEW 

  • Identifying 24 best practices of cutting edge open innovation based quadruple helix co-creation mechanisms
  • Development of a quadruple helix co-creation methodology
  • Conducting three skills matrix surveys in each country to identify the skills gap between the quadruple helix stakeholders’ needs and employee skills related to SD/CE.
  • Identifying 60 best practices of civil engineering curricula/programs from top universities
  • Establishing 3 focus Groups
  • Identifying a list of the specific areas/thematics in the main-curriculum areas for intervention
  • Development of a blueprint for the design of the curriculum
  • Development of a list of SD/CE themes, which will be incorporated into the design courses’ contents, for each of the selected thematics
  • Development of the SD/CE contents that will be integrated into the existing courses in each thematic area in Civil Engineering resulting in the newly designed curriculum
  • Development of the syllabus and contents of a new course supporting the SD/CE concepts in civil engineering
  • Organization of one Trainers’ Labs where partners will homogenize the training needs analysis as well as develop an initial strategy for the Training Academies
  • Development of a virtual learning environment (VLE) in a blended manner
  • Implementation of three Training Academies Greece, Portugal, and Turkey
  • Development of a short guideline for other educational institutions willing to implement SUSTAIN-CE Training Academies
  • Dissemination activities through the organization of three multiplier events for communicating the project’s results