International Student Projects and Sustainable Development

Goals: A Perfect Match

Jens Myrup Pedersen1, Jan Frick2, Marite Kirikova3

1
Aalborg University, Denmark
2
University of Stavanger, Norway
3
Riga Technical University, Latvia

Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

Abstract

Engineering Education is currently going through a transformation, driven by the need for educating better engineers and
more engineers, and largely build on elements such as problem orientation, interdisciplinarity, internationalization,
digitalization and sustainability. In 2020, the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership EPIC (Improving Employability Through
Internationalization and Collaboration) has combined all these elements, and demonstrated how international and
interdisciplinary student projects, focusing on solving real-world problems related to sustainability, can be carried out in a
setting where students mainly work together online. A total of 56 students from 7 EU and 2 international universities, with
backgrounds ranging from Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering to Textile Technologies and Business
Informatics were working on 9 different projects throughout the spring of 2020. The paper presents the experiences from
the setup and discusses some general recommendations for setting up this type of projects. The paper goes through the
stages of defining and carrying out the projects: Defining the overall framework, identifying problems/project proposals in
collaboration with relevant stakeholders, identifying the students and assigning students to projects, preparing students
and supervisors, organising the physical kick-off seminar, and supporting the online collaboration. We also discuss
evaluation and hand-over of the solutions, to ensure the projects have a lasting impact. We conclude that the sustainable
development goals provide a highly motivating framework for interdisciplinary, international student projects based on
problem-based learning. We also note that a careful design and execution of the all the preparatory stages are crucial in
order for the projects to succeed, and discuss specific recommendations for these.

Keywords: Active Learning; Engineering Education; Conference Information; Project Approaches.

1 Introduction
The engineering professionals we educate today need to master not only their own specific discipline: They
have to be able to work in teams, solve problems in collaboration with other people from all over the world
and with different backgrounds, and of course also to master digital technologies (Hadgraft & Kolmos, 2020).
Recently there has been also a movement towards including sustainability in the curricula: Partly because many
of the challenges engineers are working with are related to sustainability, and partly because the focus on
sustainability can help in attracting more students to the engineering disciplines. See e.g. (Guerra, 2017) and
(Dahms, Krogh Hansen & Otrel-Cass, 2012). It is also well known that Problem-Based Learning (Graaff &
Kolmos, 2003) and learning based on projects is a good way for the students to work in interdisciplinary teams
and on real-world problems, achieving competences within e.g. project management and communication
(Lima, Dinis-Carvalho, Flores & Hattum-Janssen, 2007).
The Erasmus+ EPIC project runs through 2017-2020, each spring semester testing out new ways of setting up
international and interdisciplinary student projects with focus on solving real-life problems posed by
companies or communities. The students come from one of the eight partner universities (Riga Technical
University (Latvia), Technical University of Hamburg (Germany), UPC Barcelona (Spain), University of Stavanger
(Norway), UTP University of Life Sciences (Poland), Saxion University of Applied Sciences (The Netherlands),
Abdullah Gul University (Turkey) and Aalborg University (Denmark)), and in addition to the universities the
project consortium also includes two companies. However, most of the student projects are done in
collaboration with companies outside of the formal project partnership. The project work is based on blended
mobilities, where the students collaborate mainly online, along with one physical seminar to kick-off the
projects. In the first two years (2018 and 2019) the students also had the chance for a second physical meeting,

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but in 2020 this was cancelled due to the Covid-19 situation. The project and the previous experiences are
described in (Pedersen, Kirikova, Kuladinithi & Janssen, 2019) and (Pedersen & Jensen, 2018). It is a guiding
principle throughout the EPIC project that all students work in collaborative projects, yet under the rules and
frameworks of their local universities: This also means that students hand in their projects to their home
universities and are examined according to their rules and guidelines. This choice is made in order to ensure
that the approach is scalable, and that it can be replicated beyond the EPIC consortium without the need for
hand-held solutions. Moreover, it makes it possible to overcome some of the more bureaucratic issues in terms
of enrolment, recognition, credits etc. On the other hand, this also requires a careful project design to ensure
that the students can collaborate and yet fulfil the requirements and learning objectives from their home
universities. EPIC is co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, which made it possible for
the students to participate free of charge.
One of the challenges in the previous years was to create a common denominator for the different student
projects. In 2020, we sought to achieve this by creating a common theme for all the projects: The UN
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (UN Development Goals website, 2020). In addition to creating a joint
reference framework and demonstrating how the students were all contributing to solving a bigger societal
challenge, this also made it possible to experiment with how sustainability can be integrated in many different
engineering disciplines.
Our experience and approach are described in this paper. Our main contribution is the walk-through of the
whole process from idea to carrying out the projects, with particular focus on sustainability and the SDGs. The
paper is organised as follows. First in Section 2, a background for the project is given. After this, we describe
the process of integrating sustainability with the student projects, followed by a discussion on our experience
and at last the conclusion.

2 Background
As mentioned in the introduction, the EPIC project aims at bringing together students from different disciplines
and countries to work together on solving real-world problems defined by companies or other organisations.
The model is inspired by the Problem Based Learning model from Aalborg University (Kolmos, Fink & Krogh,
2004), but also largely based on previous Erasmus+ Projects such as COLIBRI (Collaboration and Innovation for
Better, Personalized and IT-supported Learning) (COLIBRI website, 2020), where experiences and evaluations
demonstrated a high learning outcome for the participating students working on interdisciplinary problems in
international groups based on blended learning. However, a main difference is that EPIC is not a particular
course, but rather an integration of activities at the partner institutions.
From a student point of view, the semester is organised as illustrated in Figure 1. As it can be seen, there is
quite some flexibility in the schedule to accommodate for the different timings at the different universities.
Some of the deadlines (e.g. the deadline for handing in the joint report) can also be made flexible if all students
have later local project hand-in deadlines.

Figure 1: Semester structure of EPIC

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3 Integration of projects and SDGs
In this section, we go through the stages of the EPIC semester: Setting up the projects including defining the
projects and the groups, the kick-off seminar, the virtual collaboration phase, and the project hand-over at the
end. The main focus throughout the description is on the sustainability aspects and integration of SDGs.

3.1 Setting up the projects

From the beginning, it was decided to use the SDGs as the common frame for the projects. Where in previous
years, the focus was on a number of “topics” or “themes” this year it would be an array of problems related to
the SDGs. In particular, the following SDGs were chosen (UN Development Goals website, 2020):
• Affordable and Clean Energy (SDG 7)
• Sustainable Cities and Communities (SDG 11)
• Digitalization/Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure (SDG 9)
• Good Health and Well-being (SDG 3)
These areas were decided by the partners during a meeting in September 2019, and would form the framework
for the project proposals, which were defined in the next step. The topics were found to be a good fit with the
study areas involved and with the companies interested so far. Also, focusing on four of the 17 SDGs would
help to make it easier to see the connections between the different projects. Each university was responsible
for reaching out to potential company partners in order to define the precise project proposals based on these
SDGs. Thus, the project proposals were then defined in collaboration between partner universities and
companies, and each of these project proposals would aim on answering one or more of the chosen SDGs, in
a way that would also be relevant for the company or companies. The project proposals were defined during
October 2019, and ended up with the following nine projects (the number in parenthesis indicate which SDG(s)
are covered):
• Digitalisation in manufacturing (RAMBASE) (9)
• Global Recruitment Tool (9,11)
• Secure infrastructure and cyber security challenges (9)
• Measuring carbon footprint for companies (11)
• Energy optimization in 5G (7,9,11)
• Circular textile platform (11)
• Mobile education for waste pickers (3)
• IoT in selective garbage collection (3,11)
• River waste plastics recovery (11)
As the next step, the projects were announced and the students had to apply for participation which is a bit
tricky: First of all, the students will not be working on the projects until the spring semester (usually starting
around February 1 – for some a bit earlier, for some a bit later), and for some students electives are chosen
according to specific schedules at their home universities and participation in EPIC cannot be confirmed until
also other priorities are known. Second, there are also constraints from EPIC, i.e. that all projects should have
students from at least two countries – and preferably at least four students per project. To solve this challenge,
the students had to select their projects before November 30, and in case some projects had not enough
students they would have the chance to make another choice. Generally, there was no upper limit on the
number of students on each project, but in practice, having more than 8-9 students would imply that the
project would be split into multiple sub-projects. Initially, there were allocated four seats per university (due to
the limited funding for travelling), but eventually more students were allowed to join so we ended up with 41
students from the eight partner universities. Due to the different timings at the different universities, it was not
quite possible to receive all applications by November 30, and despite all good intentions the last students
were not added to the list until late January, just two weeks before the joint seminar. Also, eventually not all
projects had been filled up, and the partners made an additional (and successful) effort in finding additional
students for those projects so that in the end all of the projects had a sufficient number of students. The
students were a mix of B.Sc. and M.Sc. students from a variety of disciplines: From engineering, to business, to
textile design.

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With the focus on SDGs, the project attracted also attention from outside of Europe. Since 2018, Aalborg
University and University of Brasilia have been working together on joint student projects on helping create a
better life for the thousands of people who worked as waste pickers in the dumpsite of Brasilia – a dumpsite
that was closed in 2018, and where several programmes were established to help the waste pickers in the
transition to more organised jobs. This case inspired the last three projects on the list, and all of these projects
included also students from University of Brasilia who funded their own trip to also participate in the seminar.
In this way, the projects could also build on existing collaborations and benefit from being part of more
established projects with partners including UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) and the Central
Bank of Brazil. With 15 Brazilian students, mainly from Production Engineering, the project ended up with a
total of 56 students.
After the groups were formed, the students were connected and onboarded on the communication platform
Slack, which was used for communication both for the overall project and within the groups. Also, before the
kick-off seminar the students were invited to a Moodle-based platform (Eduspace) to be introduced to the
basics of teamwork, project planning and management, and entrepreneurship. This is similar to what was done
in the previous years and is not described in further details.
An important part of the preparation phase is also to organise the project supervision. In EPIC, all students
have a project supervisor (responsible for the whole project) a local supervisor from their own university, and
a company supervisor. All project and local supervisors followed an e-learning course prior to the seminar, and
the company supervisors are provided with informative materials about EPIC and work in close dialogue with
the project and local supervisors.

3.2 Seminar
The joint seminar is a physical meeting, which was this year held in Hamburg, Germany. It plays a crucial role
in all the projects, because the students meet face-to-face: They get to know each other, scope the projects,
make an initial problem analysis, and plan the rest of the project time. The experience from previous years, but
also from previous projects (Dahms, 1998), stress how important this physical component is in order to the
virtual collaboration phase to be successful. In the EPIC project, the seminar was held during a week in February,
with five full working days for all participants (students and teachers/supervisors).
In this paper, we will mainly focus on the activities that deal with sustainable development goals. However, to
give the full picture it is important to also mention that the week included workshops that would take the
students through the initial steps of the project: They would e.g. define the project scope, define the expected
contributions of individual students, create a project plan with milestones, and also define success criteria for
both the project and the process (e.g. collaboration). Based on previous experience this process was well
structured, and throughout the workshops the students would fill out templates to help them ensure that the
results would be useful afterwards. This is a balance between giving the students freedom to define their own
structures (thus providing ownership) and ensuring that the projects are student-led, and on the other hand
to scaffold and steer the process. Based on the experience of previous years, we acknowledge that it is very
important for the students to reach good project plans during the seminar – to avoid having to completely
redo the plan afterwards in an all-virtual setting where this is much more difficult.
In the previous years, the joint content of the seminar was mainly dealing with the most generic part of the
projects, e.g. project management, teamwork, peer assessment methods etc., and it was hard to present and
discuss the content parts since all projects were dealing with different problems and themes. The SDGs made
it possible to also bind the content closer together, in particular through the following activities:
• Day 1: The introduction to the seminar included an introduction to the UN Sustainable Development
Goals. This was in the form of an oral presentation and formed the basis for the initial discussions in
the groups about the scoping of the projects.
• Day 2: Keynote presentation by students from KU Leuven, who won a 3.000 km race for solar-powered
cars through the Australian outback. The keynote was delivered as an interactive session, where the
students discussed and had to make decisions throughout the presentation. The focus was partly on
sustainability, but equally on setting out joint project objectives and achieving them as a team.

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 • Day 3: Keynote presentation by one of the professors from University of Brasilia, who was previously
president of the waste management organisation (SLU) of Brasilia, and who led the closure of what
was the world’s second largest dumpsite (and the largest in Latin America). The talk was focusing on
both technical, social and cultural aspects of the transformation, also to demonstrate to the students
the importance of understanding the context of the engineering work.
Throughout the week, professors from the different universities were available for discussions with all the
groups. In this way, the groups received inputs and feedback from their supervisors as well as from other
professors, e.g. on the sustainability topics.

3.3 Virtual collaboration phase

During the virtual collaboration phase, the students were working mainly within the nine projects. The format
of the collaboration was varying from group to group, but included elements such as online meetings, shared
documents, and feedback on each other’s work. Moreover, we created a system for systematically providing
peer feedback among the students. The students also received supervision from both EPIC supervisors, local
supervisors, and the involved companies.

3.4 Handing over the projects

The main purpose of the student projects is of course the students learning. However, it is also highly
motivating for the students to see their results in use – and the process of taking it from “student project” to
real-life implementation is an experience with many learning points. While few of the nine projects were
finished as final production-ready products by the end of the semester, we see three different ways in which
the projects are being used or brought to use:
• Some of the projects end up in prototypes, which are ready to be tested. This is for example the case
for the IoT in selective garbage collection project. This project aims at improving the collection of
garbage in the city of Brasilia by installing sensors in containers, so it is possible to plan the collection
according to the full containers – in particular, this makes it possible to ensure that recyclables end up
in the official recycling facilities (where the previous waste pickers are working) rather than being stolen
by unofficial pickers. The prototype is limited in the sense that it should be tested at a smaller scale
first, and when scaling up more specialised devices should be used.
• Some projects end up in the form of a report with analysis and suggestions, which can be useful for
the company/companies involved. This was for example the case for the Energy Optimization in 5G
project, where the students came up with findings and recommendations which was supported by
analysis and simulations. While the impact here is less tangible, it does have an impact as it provides
the companies with insights and ideas that they might not have been able to achieve on their own.
• Some projects develop master thesis which may be useful for companies involved, but this might also
be seen as a research work with SDG recommendations beyond the directly involved companies. This
is the case with “River waste plastics recovery” where the involved management students write “The
Economics Of Plastic Recovery In Rivers: Case of Brasilia”. This work investigates the business case and
provides a socioeconomic analysis of plastic recovery from freshwater based on the collaboration with
the engineering students in the EPIC group and collaboration with students and professors from Brazil.

For several of the projects, it was initially planned that the handover would include physical visits; For example,
a joint seminar between the European and Brazilian students was planned to happen in Brasilia making both
implementation and additional field studies possible. Due to the Covid-19 situation this was not possible, and
even the possibility for the local students to interact with companies and communities was limited due to the
situation. However, it is planned that some of these activities will be resumed if the situation normalises in the
near future.

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4 Discussion
4.1 Project framing
Compared to the previous years, one of the main differences was that the SDGs was used to link the different
projects better together. We noted that in the past it was hard for the students to connect projects across
topics (and in some cases even sub-projects within the same topics): For example, two projects on Internet of
Things could be very different if one group of students worked on communication aspects, and another group
worked on an application. Even if the students were having regular meetings and updating each other on
progress, the projects would develop in different directions and it would become harder and harder to benefit
from the meetings. Here, we experienced that the SDGs provided a very useful frame: Students could see how
they all contributed to solve some of the same problems, even if the solutions were different, which also made
it easier to comment and suggest on the works – and because the SDGs made it possible to communicate a
joint vision for the projects. This was also supported by the activities during the seminar. However, it seems
that the potential in using the framing to link the projects together is even higher, and could be strengthened
through preparation materials, more activities during the seminar, and maybe also during more activities
throughout the virtual collaboration phase.
We were also positively surprised about the company interests in the SDGs. During this study we did not extend
that collaboration to e.g. Non-Governmental Organisations or community organisations (except for some of
the collaboration partners in Brazil), but this could be an interesting direction to explore in the future.

4.2 Student evaluations

Each student group documented their work by handing in a joint EPIC report. The report consists of two parts:
One part regards the content of the project, and the other part regards the evaluation of the process and
reflections on the students learning. When studying the evaluation reports, we found the following comments
to be quite consistent:
• The students found it highly motivating to work with the Sustainable Development Goals.
• The students liked to work on projects that can make a social/environmental difference.
• The students appreciated working in international and interdisciplinary environments and found that
the groups were working towards a common goal.
On the other hand, the students also indicated some areas of further improvement:
• Supervision from the different supervisors was not always consistent, i.e. different supervisors would
have different point of views.
• For some of the projects, the students would like a higher commitment from the involved companies.
• The Covid-19 situation created challenges for some of the students, mainly due to major changes in
how other learning activities were carried out/delivered – but also limiting the field work to be carried
out in EPIC and making it impossible to carry out the second physical mobility component.
By the end of the project, the students were asked to provide also a quantitative evaluation of the whole EPIC
experience. Figure 2 presents the overall evaluation of the personal experience, and demonstrates that the
students overall were happy with the experience. They found that the work will be helpful for them in their
future education/career, and that it has made them better prepared for both the national and international
labor markets.

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Figure 2: Students overall evaluation of EPIC on a scale 1-5, where 1=”Not at all” and 5=”Very much”.

Figure 3 presents the students evaluation of how the methods used in EPIC contributes to improving the
learning offer. While the evaluations are generally positive, it is noted that especially the promotion of active
learning and problem-based learning receives high scores along with the skills within problem solving,
collaboration, entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation. As such, we believe that the approach is useful in
order to help the students achieve important skills for their studies and careers.

Figure 3: Students evaluation of to what extent the teaching methods of EPIC supports the listed objectives on a scale 1-5,
where 1=”Not at all” and 5=”Very much”.

Note that two of the questions to the students were further elaborated in the electronic questionnaire they
filled out. Question 1: “Increasing employability through closer collaboration between students and industry,
by promoting active and problem-based learning and international collaboration”, Question 2: “Increasing the
labor market relevance of education through closer collaboration between industry and academia, and making
the students better prepared for both national and international labour markets”.

4.3 Project handover

The vision of “making a difference” is a main motivational factor for the students and ending up with a solution
that is actually being used is something many of the students would like to achieve.
However, making a real impact requires that:
• The projects can be either fully handed over to e.g. companies or communities who can keep using
and maintaining the products without further help from the students – or they can be handed over to

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 new groups of students who will continue the development. In both cases, the projects need to be
quite mature and well documented – something that is not often the focus when doing proof-of-
concept developments.
• The projects are quite complete – to fit with the timeframe/workload of the students as well as the
learning objectives in curricula the projects are often scoped to cover only limited parts of the full
problem. This makes it hard for other organisations to use the projects, unless they have the resources
to complete the missing parts.
Overcoming these challenges requires among other things a project scope that fits well with the learning
objectives of the students, together with a problem that fits the time/workload available for the students, or as
it was the case in some of our projects that the students are willing to spend some of their spare time to bring
the projects to a more final stage.
On this, we also note that curricula and learning objectives do not always reward students for making the
products “production ready”, including thorough documentation and hand-over processes. This implies that
the students can be caught in a lack of alignment between learning objectives, assessments and this part of
the learning objectives (Biggs & Tang, 2011) – thus creating a dilemma for the students of prioritizing
maximizing the project outcome/impact and the grade achieved. We would encourage universities and
educators to consider this when integrating sustainability into the learning objectives of engineering studies.

5 Conclusion
Our experience demonstrates that the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) fit well with international and
student projects, which aim at bringing students from different backgrounds and disciplines together to work
on solving real-world problems. In particular, the SDGs provide a strong framework for binding the projects
together and show the students that they work towards a common goal – even if they work on different
projects or sub-projects, and even if they work on projects that are different in terms of technical content. With
the high motivational factor, we also believe this indicates that working on sustainability can help in attracting
more students to engineering in the future. On the other hand, we also found that it is important to:
• Align learning objectives and assessment with both interdisciplinary project work and sustainability, so
that the sustainability is integrated in the curricula and not just a toning of existing learning activities.
• Work closely with stakeholders, scoping the projects carefully, and maybe adjusting the learning
objectives to include e.g. handover processes, so that at least some of the projects can end up being
actually used and creating an impact.
• Prepare both students and supervisors on working with sustainability, and to not only consider
sustainability from a technical point of view but also including social, cultural and economic aspects.
Our case involved 56 students from 9 different universities in 9 different countries. We hope that in the future
more universities will integrate sustainability into their curricula at a larger scale, keeping in mind the
importance of aligning learning objectives, assessments and learning activities, and that this will make it
possible to conduct more systematic and larger studies.

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