Experiences from Teaching Circular Economy Concepts to Engineering Students

Abstract

For several years, a mandatory bachelor-level course at the University of Agder (UIA) has been educating engineering students on a range of topics and ideas related to system thinking, ethics, and sustainability including circular economy. This paper investigates the learning outcomes of engineering students in this course by evaluating their knowledge of circular economy before and after attending this course to determine if current methods for teaching circular economy are effective for educating future engineers. Active learning and problem-based learning are the two primary learning techniques used in this course and students are evaluated based on their overall application of circular economy principles in group projects. The learning outcomes of the course have been evaluated based on a set of surveys given to students before and after the course to determine to what extent they have had prior knowledge of circular economy principles and how these students believe that knowledge gained in the course can be used to support regenerative and sustainable transformations in their future working life. The survey results show that engineering students have weak prior knowledge of circular economy concepts but that engineers are both enthusiastic towards sustainability issues and understand their importance. The results of this paper show that there is a need to improve circular economy education for engineers.