Imbuing Contemporary Engineering Education with Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility Perspectives: PRISMA-Based Literature Review

This article underscores the pivotal role of sustainability within contemporary engineering education curricula. It assesses how engineering programs address and integrate interdisciplinary topics such as sustainability and related corporate social responsibility (CSR) concepts. Employing the “Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses” (PRISMA) method, the researchers systematically reviewed 1,185 publications in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases covering the last five years in both databases. Findings revealed an increasing trend in integrating CSR-related concepts and content aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UNSDG). These changes were instigated by incorporating activities to develop semester-long projects, stand-alone classes, and, in certain instances, mandatory courses enriched with practical components such as internships and industry-university cooperation. Moreover, results revealed that the pedagogic formation of how these concepts were delivered in the classes was deliberately changing. While some higher education institutions opted to abandon the lecture-based approach and strive to incorporate gamification-based curriculum activities that were leveraged to develop semester-long projects, other higher education institutions launched mandatory inter-disciplinary courses with practical components (internships, industry-university cooperation, etc.) to ensure cross-pollination of ideas among disciplines as well as students from diverse background to impart sustainability-based knowledge as well as CSR-based concepts. The present study provides insight into cutting-edge strategies and curriculum development activities that higher education institutions follow.