Abstract:

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) were adopted by the United Nations, and consists in 17 goals designed to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity.

Higher education institutions (HEI) play a vital role in achieving these goals by equipping students with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to create a sustainable future. HEI can prepare students to become future leaders, reduce their own environmental impact, develop interdisciplinary solutions, engage with local and global communities, and attract and retain students and staff who are passionate about sustainability.

The SDG provide a roadmap for creating a sustainable future and require interdisciplinary solutions that can only be achieved through collaboration across different fields. Higher education can provide students with the tools to work together towards these goals.

Project-based learning (PBL) is a teaching approach that emphasizes active and experiential learning through the completion of real-world projects. PBL is gaining popularity in higher education due to its ability to promote critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, and communication skills. This approach enables students to develop practical skills that can be applied in their future careers.

Besides, there is strong statistical evidence to support the effectiveness of PBL in higher education. Using reliable databases, from national and international levels that are prepared to make comparisons of quantitative indicators related to SDG, students studied the positioning of each country/region using statistical tools such as descriptive statistics, regression analysis, cluster analysis or mapping. In this way, the use of PBL promoted critical thinking in the class, as well as creativity and communication skills, as each working group had a region/country to present.

PBL can also help students develop the skills and knowledge needed to contribute to achieving these goals. Taking this in mind, and at master level, a set of thesis are being developed, under logistics and marketing themes, which are framed by the environment and sustainable communities’ fields, using optimization techniques. These way, not only the students are engaged with the SDG, as also professors are encourage to work under multidisciplinary projects. Each team member can contribute their expertise to the project, and together, they can develop a comprehensive solution that addresses the problem from different angles.

Keywords:

Project Based Learning, Sustainable Development Goals, Higher Education, Statistics, Optimization.