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Educating engineers 2030 – PBL, social progress and sustainability

Engineering education faces challenges with how to respond to the integration of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), emerging technologies, employability and lifelong learning. In this special issue, we focus on the future of engineering education and how problem and projectbased learning could be part of the answers. We wanted to identify emerging trends for how the engineering curriculum could be formed in the future and in the call for papers we asked questions such as ‘How are higher education institutions educating engineers for 2030?’ and ‘What type of curriculum, learning goals and qualification profile are needed to educate engineers for 2030?’. With all the challenges lining up, engineering education in 2030 will require a student-centred and flexible curriculum, personalised learning environments and transformation of learning experiences into students’ competences. Problem-based and project-organised learning (PBL) are commonly regarded as examples of the future curriculum, embracing elements such as problem orientation, communication, teamwork, interdisciplinarity, participant-directed learning, critical thinking and creativity. PBL is centred on students’ learning, providing experiences and ownership over the learning process by analysing and solving real and authentic problems. Therefore, the PBL pedagogy can encompass a contextual understanding of engineering knowledge and the design processes needed to equip the students with the skills for 2030. Furthermore, this combination of contextual problems and engineering knowledge forms a platform for integrating the SDGs into education and opens up for a landscape of possibilities in developing and applying the engineering competencies needed for future professional practice (see for example National Academy of Engineering 2004, 2005; Kolmos, De Graaff, and Du 2009; Guerra 2017; Guerra et al. 2017; Guerra and Holgaard 2019; Hadgraft and Kolmos 2020). ‘PBL, social progress and sustainability’ is the theme of this special issue, composed of four articles. These four articles represent an emerging trend where educational change is taking place at the system level and focusing on systemic PBL curriculum, students’ preparedness for the labour market, curriculum reform towards PBL, collaboration with industry partners and stakeholders, integration of SDGs and developing competences. The articles present examples of how to educate future engineers to contribute to professional and social progress as well as to sustainability. In the first article, Bissett-Johnson & Radcliffe (2019) present a study of a project-based learning (PBL) studio course, engaging engineering students in social and sustainable design practices with external clients in developing economies. It is a review of how concepts from Socially Responsible Design (SRD), Appropriate Technology (AT) and Human-Centred Design (HCD) are integrated into a pedagogical model (Locale) focusing student effort on the socio-cultural, technical, economic and environmental aspects. The article presents empirical data from ten years of course operation, including 186 design projects, and reveals an upward trend in the socio-cultural and economic appropriateness of the solutions without any diminution of technical suitability. Furthermore, the article presents a new approach for designing and evaluating PBL courses with a focus on social and sustainable design. In the second article, Mann et al. (2020) argue that although PBL has a history of producing strong educational results in engineering; it does not necessarily explore educational approaches to address