André Baier receives Maffioli award for student-driven course at TU Berlin

André Baier receives SEFI Francesco Maffioli award for a student-driven course at TU Berlin

18 September 2019 – Budapest.

The SEFI Francesco Maffioli Award is given by to individual teachers, or a team of teachers, of higher engineering education institutions members of SEFI, in recognition of open-minded development of curriculum, learning environments or tools, novel didactics, methods or systems in engineering studies.

This year the Maffioli committee selected

Mr André Baier, lecturer at TU Berlin

for

Blue Engineering Initiative

The Blue Engineering Course is a student-initiated course design that addresses the social and ecological responsibility of engineering. Its student-driven character is achieved through a set of over 150 building blocks, these are well-documented teaching/learning units which provide a broad variety of interactive methods to address the complexity of technology. All building blocks are freely available online, so that anyone may conduct them.

Each semester is divided into three parts so that the students gradually acquire the competences to co-conduct and co-develop the course: 1) Students get to know high quality building blocks conducted by a lecturer/student tutor; 2) Students conduct existing building blocks; 3) Students develop new building blocks, conduct them and document them for future use.

The design of the Blue Engineering Course has been implemented as a compulsory elective course at TU Berlin since 2011. Here, over 1000 students participated in 16 consecutive semesters. Due to the modular course design, it is also successfully adapted and implemented at 6 other universities in Germany, including TU Hamburg, UaS Düsseldorf and TU Dresden.

The mixed methods evaluation of the course shows a significant increase of competences related to an engineering education for sustainable development