Abstract:

Today's society is increasingly demanding the incorporation of sustainability criteria in any aspect of our day-to-day. However, the sustainability is not properly covered in many of the industry-related university degrees, especially in the Degree in Industrial Technology Engineering (DITE). In fact, there is no specific subject related to it and/or the curriculum program has barely changed within this topic in the last two decades. Additionally, the authors consider that there are several shortcomings in current Degree Final Project (DFP) teaching-learning practices. Often, research work of DFPs is focused on very specific topics embracing a unique knowledge area. Hence, the conducted work is digress from the multidisciplinary nature inherent to the Industrial Engineering. Moreover, most of the students lack of experience in fundamental aspects such as information search and management, formulation of hypotheses, experimental design, or the analysis and communication of results. Furthermore, the detailing in some key transversal competences is limited due to the poor interaction between students of different Industrial Technology Engineering pre-intensifications.

Considering all these facts, the main objectives of this project are:
1. To bring in the Agenda 2030 of the United Nations, and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in the Degree Final Project (DFP) to increase the capacity of the students to analyse and assess the social and environmental impact of technical solutions.
2. To improve the teaching-learning process of the DFP through the systematic application of the Research-Based (RBL) Learning methodology.
3. To promote the multidisciplinary vision of industrial engineering.

The process performance of the student have been assessed by previously established evaluation tools and their results compared with the control group (students that conducted their DFPs according to the regular system). Eight subject from DITE with different pre-intensifications have worked on research DFPs proposed to address a common challenge: “to improve sustainability and reduce the environmental impact in key industrial sectors of the Basque Country”. This challenge, framed within SDG 7 (affordable and clean energy) and SDG 9 (industry, innovation and infrastructure) included in the Agenda 2030, were addressed from different approaches, each of which covered several engineering disciplines. Additionally, the mentioned shortcomings have been counteracted by means of scientific method seminars, results presentations, and multidisciplinary discussions.

According to the analysis of the learning outcomes (SDG and Agenda 2030, Information management, technical writing, Oral presentation, Ethics) we could stablish a relationship between the perception of the subjects during the learning process and control-students and our last evaluation. Results show an positive increase of the subjects’ perception for all the learning outcomes. Specially, a better perception on these three cathegories: SDG and Agenda 2030, information management and technical writing, was observed comparing to control-students. Moreover, based on the results obtained from the evaluation of lecturers, our subjects got better results in all the categories. These results validate the need of specific training during the DFP.

In conclusion, the knowledge and perception in mentioned learning outcomes of our subjects was improved by following the proposed RBL methodology.

Keywords:

Agenda 2030, final degree project, research based learning, sustainable development goals.