Abstract:

Since the establishment of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly, numerous initiatives have been developed for their dissemination, analysis, and compliance. At the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), several SDGs dissemination projects have been carried out over the last few years, initially aimed at making students aware of their existence and importance, and familiarising them with their content. Now, in a second more ambitious phase, the aim is for students to learn how they can contribute to the achievement of the SDGs in their future professional activity.

In this context, some UPV schools such as the School of Informatics and the School of Industrial Engineering, are considering how interesting it might be for students to explicitly include content referring to the SDGs in their bachelor’s and master’s theses (BMTs). Specifically, the aim would be for students to explain in their BMT how their study or project is contributing to the fulfilment of the SDGs.

Despite the importance that students’ knowledge of the SDGs and the impact of their future jobs on them can have for companies and society, the literature search on this topic has yielded few results. This shows that there is a gap to be filled, not only in terms of connecting the SDGs with BMTs, but also in terms of initiatives to make students aware of and familiar with the SDGs at university level, possibly due in part to their novelty.

At the same time, the School of Informatics and the School of Industrial Engineering are aware that the establishment of new requirements for students must be accompanied by the development of support tools, so that these requirements can be met as effectively and efficiently as possible. In this paper, a methodology is proposed to facilitate the incorporation of the SDGs in the BMTs for students of the UPV’s School of Computer Engineering and School of Industrial Engineering. The development of this methodology will also allow a first approach to questions such as: will the inclusion of new content on the SDGs increase the difficulty and length of the BMTs? What additional length would be advisable? Would it depend on each degree, each type of BMT, each student…? Where, in which chapter or section, would it be advisable to include this new content? How would it be evaluated, with what type of rubric?

Keywords:

Sustainable development goals, higher education, bachelor’s theses, master’s theses.