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This Research to Practice Full Paper focuses on the European Universities initiative, which has launched the creation of European University networks to develop the European education sector and to enhance institutional capabilities for tackling grand societal challenges. We critically discuss the rationale and goals for establishing such alliances, focusing on the example of the EuroTeQ Engineering University. How can the formation of university alliances create learning networks and, in this way, increase moral reflexivity? For this purpose, we will consider the role of universities of technology in the 21stCentury and the role that university alliances as learning networks can play to fulfil this role.

Value-sensitive design (VSD) has helped to introduce non-technical concerns into engineering projects, where different, sometimes competing stakeholder goods are considered and addressed. Given the increasingly global environments of contemporary engineering, it might appear as though such frameworks would be useful in addressing cross- and inter-cultural concerns in engineering, where different, sometimes competing cultural values can come into conflict. This paper will argue such approaches are limited, since research in moral and cultural psychology demonstrates that values alone fail to do the normative and empirical work VSD suppose they do. Values are typically conceived as long-standing beliefs or ideas, about which states are worth pursuing, that guide behaviors. Normatively, VSD approaches say nothing about which values should be pursued/implemented: Values aim at preferred states, but simply because some states are preferred says nothing about whether they should be preferred, whether/why they are worth pursuing. Empirically, values are not especially good at picking out cultural groups, and they fail to predict behaviors across cultures: For example, according to the Schwartz value scale, values of mainland Chinese, Hong Kongese, and Singaporean Chinese – typically considered part of the same cultural group – are closer to those of people in Zimbabwe, Israel, and Malaysia, respectively, than they are to each other; the power of values to predict behaviors varies by culture, where the values of non-WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic) groups say very little about how they will behave. Instead, global approaches to engineering should turn to what we call “norm-sensitive design” (NSD). Norms are intrinsically motivating rules, about which types of behaviors are obligatory or prohibited, which are propagated, enforced, and internalized through sanctioning systems. Although norms are typically conceived as following from values, this relation only make sense from the perspective of WEIRD cultures, where personal preferences are closely linked to individual behaviors. Unlike values, norms/norm systems are directly concerned with behaviors by nature and, therefore, affect the world. They have evolved, affecting behaviors that facilitate the universally human problem of large-scale, anonymous cooperation. This commonly human concern provides a touchstone in terms of which to understand and address different, conflicting norms. Normatively, all such systems address the same ultimate concern, although they do so in different ways, addressing specific circumstances related to differing climates, resources, and histories throughout their evolution. This framework could help to facilitate largescale human cooperation, a goal of global engineering. Empirically, norms/norm systems would be better indicators of cultural groups, helping to understand and potentially overcome cultural disagreements. As a result, NSD would have implications for engineering design and practice, not only embodying diverse values in technology, but also cultivating consensus through common behaviors with engineering.

Challenge-based learning (CBL) is a trending educational concept in engineering education. The literature suggests that there is a growing variety in CBL implementations, stemming from the flexible and abstract definition of CBL that is shaped by teachers’ perceptions. The chapter discusses how the CBL concept has been developed at Eindhoven University of Technology and describes the development and use of two educational resources aimed to facilitate conceptualization, design, and research of CBL for curriculum designers and teachers. The first resource is a set of CBL design principles for framing the variety of CBL and providing teachers with advice about how to develop CBL courses within an overall CBL curriculum. The second resource is a curriculum-mapping instrument called the CBL compass, which aims at mapping CBL initiatives and identifying gaps, overlaps, and misalignments in CBL implementation at a curriculum level. Both CBL design principles and the CBL compass have been developed by combining insights from theory and practical examples of CBL at TU/e into a higher order model of vision, teaching and learning, and support. We discuss the two educational instruments and showcase their application in the Eindhoven Engineering Education (E3) program, and we discuss preliminary findings and insights. The chapter concludes with recommendations for future practice and research.

The chapter presents the implementation of ethics education via challenge-based learning (CBL) in three European settings. At TU Eindhoven (the Netherlands), a mandatory first-year User, Society, and Enterprise course on the ethics and history of technology offers a CBL alternative on ethics and data analytics in collaboration with internal student and research teams. The University of Lübeck (Germany) initiated the project CREATE – Challenge-based Learning for Robotics Students by Engaging Start-Ups in Technology Ethics, which enables 60 students in Robotics and Autonomous Systems to integrate ethical and societal considerations into technological development processes, in cooperation with start-ups from a local accelerator. In Spain, CBI-Fusion Point brings together 40 students from business and law (ESADE), engineering and technology (Polytechnic University of Catalonia), and design (IED Barcelona Design University) for an innovation course focused on the application of CERN-developed technologies to real-world problems. The chapter documents the process of setting up three CBL courses that engage students with grand societal topics which require the integration of ethical concerns from the design stage of technological development. The authors also reflect on the challenges of teaching ethics via CBL and the lessons they learned by delivering experiential learning activities rooted in real-life challenges and contexts marked by high epistemic uncertainty. The contribution reflects the transition to remote teaching and presents strategies employed to enhance online communication and collaboration. The chapter thus provides guidance for instructors interested in teaching ethics via CBL and recommends further lines for action and research.

Universities introduce real-life stakeholders in their courses as challenge based learning (CBL). We argue that the literature has not yet discussed the role of responsibility for universities, their students and their ecosystems in this new format. This paper explores this gap by using Niklas Luhmann’s concepts of structural differentiation, structural coupling and irritation. It studies how the focus of CBL on responsibility influences the structural couplings of the subsystems education, research and economy in society. We expect that responsibility in students and universities could be promoted by creating structural couplings between these subsystems. The paper shows why practice-based education may be undersupplied at universities and how novel education formats can be understood to fill this gap.

Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) is an active-learning pedagogy increasingly used in Engineering Education to prepare students for their future careers by emphasizing knowledge acquisition and application and developing disciplinary and transdisciplinary skills. The purpose of this study is to describe the implementation of a CBL course, guided by the spiderweb curriculum framework, for first-year engineering students from different disciplines and explore students' perceptions of factors that facilitated or inhibited their learning. We analyzed the results of the formal course evaluation consisting of a survey and two open-ended questions. In addition, we conducted 16 individual interviews after the end of the course. Results indicated that students appreciated the real-life aspect of the challenge, and a client's involvement enhanced their engagement to the challenge and made their learning relevant. On the other hand, students seemed to find the course structure quite complicated, with many meetings during the week, several communication platforms, and the distribution of individual and group work for the final assignment. Lessons learned and future directions for practice and research are discussed.

Designing qualitative reflection in (first-year's) engineering (ethics) education is challenging. We developed a reflection activity in a challenge-based learning course, based on three open questions, a weekly coaching session and a weekly coaching assignment. We use two models (ethics goals model and pedagogical component model) to analyze (1) what the effectiveness is of the reflection method, (2) how the students' learning gains are distributed in this reflection, and (3) what the usefulness of these models is to analyze the reflection of a CBL course. We conducted a qualitative analysis, where data were drawn from weekly reflections written by 41 students participating in the course E3Challenge2. Using the text-search query by ATLAS.ti, we identified 180 relevant excerpts about ethics and 34 about coaching. Through an iterative and collaborative process, the excerpts were analyzed thematically and categorized under 12 themes describing students' attainment of ethics learning goals. We describe (1) that the method provided in-depth reflections of the students but is not scalable, (2) a distribution of different ethics goals, and (3) strengths and gaps (epistemology, pedagogical) of the two models in the use of reflective evaluation. We conclude with a plea to use the models in evaluation of reflection methods and with possible further research for the ethics goal model.

The SEFI 2021 annual conference committee provided me the opportunity to publish this text based on the SEFI Francesco Maffioli Award. I am happy to use this opportunity to sketch the Engineering Ethics Education (EEE) and Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) research I have been doing the last seven years. I will focus here on the redesign of a large first-year’s course for ethics and history of technology as an example. I will conclude with expressing my confidence that the dynamic communities working on for CBL and EEE can tackle the future challenges I list here.

Self-regulated learning (SRL) is one the key pedagogical principles of Challenge-based Learning (CBL) in engineering curricula. Students in CBL have the primary responsibility for planning, implementing, and evaluating their effort and progress. This study explores the use of learning portfolios as a pedagogical tool aimed to document students’ SRL in a CBL course for 1st year engineering students. The research question was: How is SRL documented in a personal learning portfolio during a CBL course? Students were expected to work for 9 weeks with a group of peers on an open-ended challenge. Students were asked to complete a learning portfolio at 3 moments. In week 1, they were asked to set, individually, 5 disciplinary and 5 professional goals they wanted to achieve and in week 5 and 9 they were encouraged to reflect on the progress and attainment of those goals. Twelve students’ learning portfolios were included for analysis in this study. Content analysis of the learning portfolios revealed that students in week 1, described goal setting and in week 5 described SRL processes such as monitoring and self- evaluation while in the final submission in week 9, students reflected on the attainment of their individual goals and the overall success of their project, revealing a need for balancing their own disciplinary and professional goals and the overall goals of group they were members of. The study suggests that learning portfolios provide a useful instrument to encourage SRL in CBL. Limitations and implications for education and research are discussed.

Power, as enacted in educational practices, is a critical issue that shapes all aspects of engineering education. Yet, there is little research within engineering education on how power manifests itself in what we teach and how we teach it. In this paper we use engineering ethics education as an exemplar to interrogate how power tacitly influences the practice of engineering ethics education. To infer the status of engineering ethics as an academic subject we examine, theorize, and elaborate on two aspects of power: (1) the internal power relations affecting the education of engineering ethics and how they manifest within engineering institutions, and (2) the exerting power of key external actors in and ways in which they impact engineering ethics education. Our methodological approach relies on autoethnographic data rooted in the perspective of the three authors. The autoethnographic cases are grounded in the authors’ own teaching and research practices in engineering ethics education set in the US, Irish and Dutch context. We perform a cross-comparative analysis to reflect further on the impact of power relations on ethics as an academic subject and make recommendations for engineering ethics education research and practice.

Engineering Education aims at realizing students’ satisfaction and intrinsic motivation. However, students’ frustration is never fully banned. In this article, I argue that one of the reasons for the limited focus on frustration in Engineering Education is the limited focus on frustration in classical motivational theory itself. I focus on Self-Determination Theory and distinguish between the early work focussing on satisfaction and the recent work considering frustration as a distinct active threat. I will complement this theoretical approach with an empirical analysis of data from a large ethics of technology course in 2016 and 2020 at Eindhoven University of Technology. Two research questions are asked: “(RQ1) Do basic needs satisfactions and frustrations in the USE basic course confirm the asymmetrical pattern described in recent literature?”; and “(RQ2) Do basic needs frustrations add to the variance of motivation types?” I performed principal axis factoring with an oblique rotation to answer RQ1 and stepwise regression analyses to answer RQ2. I conclude that basic need frustration can be measured as a clearly different concept compared to satisfaction and that splitting these two concepts is helpful for Engineering Education when studying motivation. I discuss two main avenues for Engineering Education: motivational theories should take need profiles and need trajectories into account in course design; and motivational research should inquire how individuals can learn to cope adaptively with need-frustrating experiences.

This paper describes, at raw-data level, the results of a workshop at SEFI 2021 on “comparing institutional strategies for engineering ethics education in regional, national and European contexts”. It uses the curriculum typology of Goodlad. The results indicate the diversity of answers at the European scale for the ideal, formal, perceived and operational curriculum. Although there were some first contextual differences noticeable, the set of answers was too small to give an in-depth analysis, but it opens up a promising area for future research.

This chapter gives an overview of the concept of energy from a transcultural perspective. Often, energy is only approached by means of the stipulative definition as used in science. This usage disregards the specific philosophical origins of the concept. In the comparative philosophy of Ulrich Libbrecht, the concept of energy is used as a comparative category, which has related concepts in each of the various ideal types of worldviews—the Greek, the Indian, and the Chinese—his comparative model describes. By informing ourselves of particularly Buddhist and Chinese perspectives on energy and ethics, we can transform and expand our understanding of energy, in order to increase its explanatory power, with regard to contemporary questions of energy justice. This includes a posthuman approach towards it.

Technological innovations and users’ values mutually influence each other, shown by theories as science-technology and society (STS), mediation or postphenemenology. Policy makers and stakeholders use methods as Value Sensitive Design to proactively maximise certain values. It selects stakeholders and sketching the trade-offs between their various values, it tests the contexts and experiences of stakeholders by technological designs and analyses how the new technologies realise particular values. Overviews of VSD indicate inclusions of important values as accountability, transparency, democracy, justice, trust, privacy and responsibility into the design. ‘System change’ is nowhere in this list. The analysis of ‘empowerment’ into two aspects powerfulness and influence (respectively ‘kracht’ and ‘macht’ in Dutch) can make clear why. Many co-creation projects try to make people more powerful. Stronger people need less help and therefore are cheaper, so decision-makers like that. But stronger people have more skills to interpret the negative structural aspects of their own situation. They have own ideas, which often are less welcome to the power structure in favour of dominant companies or politicians. VSD scholars often prescribe moderator neutrality, value openness, and silent majority respect. Empowerment scholars make another plea. They reject neutrality, they put structural change up and front even when participants are not asking for it and they demand minority ownership. Let’s take a Community Virtual Power Plant (cVPP) as an example. VPP’s are ICT solutions that aggregate distributed energy sources as solar and batteries to form a virtual power station. Too often, the VPP’s are instruments of powerful companies to manage grid stabilization. Electricity owners are instrumentalised with an empowerment rhetoric. A system-change VSD can support so called community-based VPP’s that allow communities to actively manage and distribute self-generated energy. They can be driven by community needs and goals, such as the ambition to become energy independent by using self-generated renewable energy, strengthen local communities, create local jobs or other local issues. They will inevitably face structural resistance of powerful companies trying to maintain the current agreements of energy distribution and electricity net management and putting pressure to local politicians supporting these projects. cVPP’s will only defeat the counterforces with a revolutionary VSD. VSD can fundamentally change structures, but it therefore needs to carefully rethink its basic premises, not in the academic security, but in the heart of the societal power play.

IntroductionSelf Determination Theory (SDT) suggests that the satisfaction of the basic psychological needs contributes tostudents’ intrinsic motivation as well as a deep approach to learning (Ryan and Deci, 2000; Baeten, Kyndt, Struyven,& Dochy, 2010). In our study, we used the SDT framework to evaluate and redesign a large basic course of Historyand Ethics for first year engineering students.MethodsWe conducted cluster analysis to understand how different combinations of students’ satisfaction of autonomy andcompetence are related to intrinsic motivation, perception of learning, perceived value of the course and overallsatisfaction with it. Questionnaires exploring all abovementioned variables were administered to the students at theend of the course. The sample consisted of 565 students. In addition, in depth interviews with 12 students wereconducted using the SDT framework to explore students’ perceptions of the learning environment and the factorsthey considered as supportive to their autonomy and competence. The qualitative data were analyzed thematically.ResultsThree clusters were derived based on students’ satisfaction of autonomy and competence: a low, a medium and ahigh satisfaction cluster. Follow-up post hoc tests showed that these clusters differed significantly across alldependent variables. Students in the high satisfaction cluster, reported significantly higher intrinsic motivation, atransformative approach to learning, more appreciation and satisfaction with the course. The qualitative study alsoindicated that students value the possibility to formulate groups and choose the project theme as indicators ofautonomy. Perceived competence was enhanced via structured feedback activities, sufficient time allocated toexercises, clarity of learning objectives and study material. Other important factors for students’ intrinsic motivationsuggested by the qualitative study was the perceived relevance and value of the course for students’ professionalidentity as engineers.DiscussionOur study confirms that satisfaction of students’ perceived autonomy and competence plays an important role intheir intrinsic motivation, approach to learning and course satisfaction. We will discuss in detail the findings of thecluster analysis and we will provide suggestions for educational changes in the learning environment that supportstudents’ basic psychological needs.ReferencesBaeten, M., Kyndt, E., Struyven, K., & Dochy, F. (2010). Using student-centred learning environments to stimulatedeep approaches to learning: Factors encouraging or discouraging their effectiveness. Educational ResearchReview, 5(3), 243–260.Ryan, R. M. and Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-Determination Theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, socialdevelopment, and well-being, American Psychologist, 55, 68–78.