ESTABLISHING A NEW SEMINAR TO COMBINE LEARNING ABOUT TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY

Abstract

For the transformation we face in industry and society, a broad societal consensus and collaboration between different stakeholders are vitally important. With this in mind, the Environmental Engineering program focuses on environmentally relevant technical developments and the consideration of systemic interrelationships while incorporating societal frameworks. The recently implemented course Technology - Dialogue - Society was developed as an introduction to these complex tasks for first-year students. It focusses on topics of the energy transition sector and public participation. The learning objectives of the course are the acquisition of methodological competencies as well as the promotion of communication, teamwork and the ability to reflect. An overarching goal of the course is also onboarding of students in the program. A wide set of teaching-learning methods is used to achieve this broad objectives. In addition to lectures, collaborative and dialogue-oriented teaching-learning methods such as problem-based learning, peer review of student work, conversational simulations and reflection assignments are used. A particular challenge of implementation was the course size of approximately 100 students and the need for online teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The structure of the course is described and the evaluation results of the first run are presented.