Educating the Energy Engineers of Tomorrow : challenges of internationalisation and knowledge interchange

This paper summarises the authors’ own teaching experiences from two large MSc-level courses taught as part of several international Master programmes related to Sustainable Energy Engineering, organized by the Department of Energy Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. Some important hinders and obstacles to effective learning are presented and discussed, addressing especially certain challenges for the students and their effect on student performance. Observations have been made throughout several years of increasing demand for energy- and sustainability-related knowledge by ever larger student groups. The growing number of international students and the fact that many students are aiming at expanding their abilities by specialising in energy engineering without having the necessary background, as well as the fact that many students following certain non-engineering programmes focusing on environmental or sustainability issues need nevertheless to study also purely engineering courses, brings many positive characteristics to the blended student team but also displays serious challenges to the practical optimisation of the learning activities, the intended learning outcomes, the speed of advancement in knowledge, and the general quality of education for such a diverse group of students. Possible improvements and augmentations of the learning activities with the goal of finding solutions to these challenges on both a programme level and course level are proposed and subjected to testing in recent student batches. The expected results in terms of improved student performance, and the plausible further extension of this work, are introduced and analysed.QC 20120308