An Introductory Energy Course to Promote Broad Energy Education for Undergraduate Engineering Students

Abstract

Engineering graduates must be prepared to support our world’s need for a clean and sustainable energy future. Complex problems related to energy and sustainability require engineers to consider the broad spectrum of interrelated consequences including human and environmental health, sociopolitical, and economic factors. Teaching engineering students about energy within a societal context, simultaneous with developing technical knowledge and skills, will better prepare them to solve real-world problems. Yet few energy courses that approach energy topics from a human-centered perspective exist within engineering programs. Engineering students enrolled in energy programs often take such courses as supplemental to their course of study. This paper presents an engineering course that approaches energy education from a socio-technical perspective, emphasizing the complex interactions of energy technologies with sustainability dimensions. Course content and learning activities are structured around learning outcomes that require students to gain technical knowledge as well as an understanding of broader energy-related impacts. The course attracts students from a variety of majors and grade levels. A mixed quantitative/qualitative assessment conducted from 2019–2021 indicates successful achievement of course learning outcomes. Students demonstrated significant gains in technical content knowledge as well as the ability to critically address complex sociotechnical issues related to current and future energy systems.

Exploring Engineering Students' Attitudes: Impacts of Sociotechnical vs. Technical Courses

“…Our results also suggest that sociotechnical classes are effective in developing all students' understanding of sociotechnical engineering. Similar results have been determined from studies conducted with first-year students enrolled in introduction to engineering sociotechnical classes [10,36] and students enrolled in energy-focused sociotechnical classes [11,19]. However, Leydens et al [18] found that students' views of social justice and engineering did not change as a result of being enrolled in engineering science classes where social justice was integrated into the coursework.…”

“…For example, using contextualized engineering problems in homework problem sets or in class that expose students to the social or human side of engineering can add context to engineering science classes [40]. Real-world, contextualized applications of engineering that require students to think about engineering as sociotechnical can also be implemented in these engineering courses as described by Hoople et al [11], DeWaters et al [19], and Leydens et al [18].…”

“…Courses that approach engineering from a sociotechnical framework may better expose them to engineering in context and the importance of incorporating social dimensions during the design process [11,[15][16][17][18]. Recent research has shown that this approach positively benefits students' understanding of engineering and sociotechnical thinking without reducing the amount of technical material they retain [11,19].…”