Co-designing a CBL curriculum to act towards the future we want

Engineering students require competencies to navigate the inherent complexities, uncertainties and value-laden character defining Grand Societal Challenges, as captured in the Sustainable Development Goals. Accordingly, in engineering education, we should broaden the perspective beyond the development of technical expertise and enable engineering students to develop themselves as change agents capable of realizing responsible societal impact. Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) has emerged as a promising educational approach for educating change agents through entrepreneurial learning. In CBL, students experience the iterative, entrepreneurial process of value creation by addressing authentic challenges together with peers and (external) stakeholders while developing entrepreneurial competencies from the undertaking. However, although the effects of this pedagogical approach are promising, we need further studies to understand how CBL contributes to educating entrepreneurial and sustainability competencies. While CBL promotes experiential learning, a more explicit integration of entrepreneurial and sustainability competencies in CBL can help to understand more specifically how we can educate entrepreneurial engineers as change agents. From an education design perspective, to reach a better understanding of the quality of our education, we should (1) understand entrepreneurial engineers in the context of addressing GSCs and subsequently (2) understand how entrepreneurial competencies are intertwined with sustainability competencies along the value-creation process of engineers facing GSCs. To address the first inquiry, the authors studied the different orientations entrepreneurial engineers can have, providing insights into how they address GSCs. The outcomes of this first study were translated into four orientations of entrepreneurial engineers and revealed how the validation-refinement-iteration cycle drives progress along the phases of the value creation process. In a nutshell, the Entrepreneurial Engineers develop their solutions along the value creation process by considering scientific and technological innovation (ST), business and management (BM), lifelong learning (LL), and societal impact and change (IC). With these orientations in mind, the second and current inquiry requires allocating entrepreneurial and sustainability competencies along the orientations, increasing our understanding of what competencies engineering students should develop per orientation. We propose a collaborative session to work on a competency-based curriculum that aligns CBL practices with the four orientations of entrepreneurial engineers. The outcomes of this workshop will contribute to the third study of the PhD position within the project Educating the Entrepreneurial Engineer, part of the Center for Engineering Education (4TU.CEE) strategic plan (2022-2025), which includes Eindhoven University of Technology, Wageningen University & Research, Delft University of Technology, and the University of Twente. This study specifically addresses the overarching theme, The Future of Engineering Education, focusing on Entrepreneurial Learning.