Innovation in Sustainability Education

In 2015-2016, the Business Administration and Electromechanical Engineering programmes received intensive support in pilot projects. Read more about the results and lessons learned.

In 2017-2017, one of these programmes was followed up through the faculty's educational innovation project ‘Sustainable Engineering Practice’. In this context, sustainability was structurally embedded in the ‘Cross-disciplinary project’ course component of the Electromechanical Engineering programme (view the study sheet and the student assignment in the inspiration guide). Efforts were also made to develop a ‘sustainability learning pathway’ throughout this bachelor's programme.

Between 2019 and 2024, similar pilot projects were rolled out in numerous other educational programmes at other faculties, such as the Law programmes, the Social Work programme, the Bioengineering programme, etc. This was anchored in the strategy of the university-wide policy choices (UBKs) and the special commissioner for Sustainability (by Ellen Vandenplas and Thomas Block). Read more about the results and lessons learned.

At the same time, there was an ambition to strive for accelerated upscaling of the integration of sustainability in education at Ghent University. To this end, a pilot project was developed to integrate sustainability into all programmes at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. The focus here was not only on integration into the various programmes, but also on integrating sustainability into the supporting faculty policy to enable permanent integration.

In addition to the pilot projects, a learning network was also set up to support Ghent University lecturers in integrating sustainable development into their own courses. Finally, intensive guidance was also provided to lecturers to help them integrate sustainability into their courses.