To achieve the SDGs, the UNESCO Chair “Engineering for Society” in the University Politehnica of Bucharest is implementing interdisciplinary programs on sustainable aviation education through green, smart and innovative IT&C perspectives.
Considering the key role of education in achieving SDGs and the need of a new learning culture in Higher Education to support sustainable development, UPB supported the international initiatives on sustainability by setting up a UNESCO Chair on “Engineering for Society” in 2017, which is currently developing two interdisciplinary master study programmes in alignment with the SDGs and the UNESCO objectives.
Our main target group are graduates of bachelor’s study programs from the field of transport engineering, aerospace engineering, and environmental engineering.
The “Green, Smart and Integrated Transport and Logistics” study programme is providing the students with a holistic understanding of different technology options and methods, cross-disciplinary abilities, all the necessary competences to develop, analyse and manage innovative and advanced sustainable systems for transportation and logistics.
The use of Information Technologies and Communications as a UNESCO objective is challenging the social environment and open innovative perspectives to education, in general, and in particular to aviation education. To meet these challenges, after several consultations with relevant stakeholders, the learning outcomes and curricula for a new interdisciplinary master program, “Information Technologies Applied in Aviation” were established, which became also a working package within the KA2 Erasmus+ project “Knowledge Alliance in Air Transport (KAAT)”. After receiving the feedback from several direct and associated partners, the final version was established. Currently it is being implemented in UPB, with the support of teachers from all European partner universities.
The study programs were designed and implemented as an international study programme using learning outcomes in line with the Education for Sustainable Development and IT applications and are being deployed using methods of competency-based learning. To add, the courses are conducted by international teams formed by teachers from UPB and teachers and professionals from other partner institutions from abroad having important contributions to the educational internationalisation policy of UPB.
For our next steps, we will be proposing new European projects for sustainable development and innovation in engineering processes and for the continuation of the policy of education. We will focus also to sustain the foreign students from African countries to enroll in our study programmes.