Abstract:

The increasing complexity of mining operations results in increased requirements for the mining engineering education. The demand of broad skills sets is the reason to improve mining engineering education programs in the context of facing also the deep transformation that the industry is facing end the need of a new generation of workforce and engineers with new training profiles, able to manage the changes.

In Europe, there were no academic institutes applying CDIO for primary resource related university programs (Exploration, Mining, Mineral Processing, and Metallurgy). Supported by the EIT Raw Materials, a first international education project was developed in 2016 – 2017 to contribute to the implementation of the CDIO methodology in primary resources linked programs. This first project focused on faculty development for an active and experimental learning by teaching the “technical” faculty through CDIO linked courses (entrepreneurship, business, etc.), communicative workshops, inspiration lectures and by involving the “business and entrepreneurial” faculty in exploration, mining, mineral processing and metallurgy related issues and also through curriculum and pilot cases developed together with the industry.

In 2018, also with this support, a second project started focusing on the development of innovative labs for education in these specific engineering disciplines of the primary sector of the mineral raw materials value chain. This paper describes the results of the application of this methodology in programs of the Technical University of Madrid, which is one of the partners of this international project taken ahead by different European universities. It also describes how EIT Raw Materials is supporting this kind of initiatives, as it is one of the six Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) initiated by the EIT (European Institute of Innovation and Technology), and funded by the European Commission, that has the mission of contributing to boost competitiveness, growth, and attractiveness of the European raw materials sector via radical innovation and guided entrepreneurship resulting in new education programs.

Keywords:

International projects, CDIO, Mining Engineering, New learning environments.