New ways in engineering education for a sustainable and smart future

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents a constructivist concept for engineering education for non-technical students. Global challenges and transformation processes lead to a rapid increase in problems at the boundary between technical and non-technical disciplines in higher education. Furthermore, new fields of work emerge due to the digital transformation. Graduates need to be prepared to identify and describe problems and to develop appropriate solutions in teams in order to contribute to change processes related to the future in a smart world. Engineering sciences have to take up the challenge to provide suitable educational programs for a broader target group, i.e. non-technical students, especially in light of the current shortage of qualified specialists. This paper contributes twofold to that discourse on transformation processes in Engineering Education: (1) by the development of a theory-based teaching and learning concept on electrical engineering for this special target group of non-technical students; and (2) by presenting the implementation of the undergraduate (bachelor) course with innovative project-based laboratory experiments.