The Sustainable Development Goals: An Experience on Higher Education

Abstract

Sustainable development is acquiring high attendance in higher education. In fact, one of the targets for the Sustainable Development Goals announced by the United Nations in September 2015 aims to ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, thorough education on sustainable development. The current study focuses on the evaluation of individual works based on the sustainable development suggested to students in a subject of the Master's of Thermal Engineering at the University of Vigo. In addition, a sustainable holistic rubric is presented, which was used to analyze the ability of the students to incorporate sustainability principles in their work. The rubric was based on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and the associated targets of the United Nations, more specifically on the Goals 7, 8, 12, and 13. A total of 10 works were evaluated. As a general conclusion, it was found that the students generally do not consider or consider to a lower extent the economic criteria opposite to the environmental, technical, and social dimensions. The environmental sub-criterion were applied to a greater extent in the development of the works. However, the technical and social dimensions were included to a greater or lesser extent depending on the type of work developed.

Teaching for a Better World. Sustainability and Sustainable Development Goals in the Construction of a Change-Maker University

“…In this sense, some experiences have been described; for example, Albareda-Tiana et al analyzed how to develop sustainability competencies in future teachers [68]. The development of works in the field of the Master in Thermal Engineering has been presented by Crespo et al [69]. The Conference of Vice-chancellor of Spanish universities indicated that service-learning could be a tool for the development of sustainability in the university context [32,70].…”

Optimizing Green Computing Awareness for Environmental Sustainability and Economic Security as a Stochastic Optimization Problem

“…It also encompasses efficient energy utilization. Socioeconomic activities that contribute to national economic indicators such as real gross domestic product (GDP), income, employment, manufacturing and retails sales [18] have to take into cognisance an environment that is humanly friendly as captured by the global policy framework called sustainable development goals [19]. This means both the natural environment and social environment [20] have to be protected.…”

Developing and Validating an Individual Sustainability Instrument with Engineering Students to Motivate Intentional Change

“…By and large, items 1-7-designed as the economic subscale-hung together (Factor 2); this was particularly clear for the Real survey. Additionally, items 8-20-designed as the social (items 8-13) and intellectual (items [14][15][16][17][18][19][20] subscales -hung together fairly cleanly (Factor 1). Items 21-28-designed as the emotional subscale-were split between Factor 1 and Factor 3.…”