SUSTAINABLE ENERGY IN AN INTERNET-OF-THINGS WORLD

FACULTY WORLDWIDE

The future will be digital and sustainable. And tomorrow’s sustainable society will be shaped with the help of Internet -of- Things. This message has been picked up on Ghent Technology Campus: from 14 to 18 March, an intensive programme has been organized on this theme. About 50 engineering students from 7 different countries have been working on new insights and technologies that will turn our energy supply, energy distribution and energy use more sustainable for the next generations.

Prof. Liesbet Van der Perre and Simon Ravyts, the organisers of this course (with EU funding as a Blended Intensive Programme) are looking back on a successful edition. Their research groups Dramco and Electra saw an opportunity to engage in this adventure together.

Prof. Liesbet Van der Perre and Simon Ravyts

© Tine Desodt

“The multi-disciplinarity of the course turned out to be a major added value”, explains Prof. Van der Perre.” It has brought our two research teams on renewable energy and IoT closer together, which we believe will result in increased future collaboration.”

The course’s focus is on the concept of ‘SUSTOPIA’: a society where living, working, transport and leisure are organized in the most sustainable way. Energy generation, storage, distribution, and usage all get ample attention, together with the societal impact for transport, urban planning, work organization and other domains.

Project based

International experts from the universities of Lund, La Rochelle, Porto, and Anhalt as well as industry experts contributed to the intensive course. Students were divided into teams after registration and were given the assignment of developing concrete cases in international teams under the supervision of academic coaches. “The project-based learning approach in teams created a special learning experience for the participating students”, says Simon. The classical teaching system is replaced with a more active format where student learn to work with real life challenges and with the unpredictability of problems and the variables and incomplete information which are inherent to complex issues such as energy sustainability.”

This one-week international course is not only innovative by its integrated and multidisciplinary approach ‘under way to a SUSTOPIA society’, but also the format is using a combination of transnational online collaboration and physical mobility.

This blended type of education is a new format of international education, combining the best elements of physical mobility (the international and intercultural immersion) and the online component (digital learning and education).

Network

The SUSTOPIA course is part of a larger scheme of seven intensive courses that have been set up by the partner universities of the EUCLIDES network, the EUCLIDES INTERNATIONAL WEEKS. The Faculty of Engineering Technology, as a founding member of EUCLIDES network, is participating actively in six of the seven projects.

Students and staff participating in these courses have been working online in teams for a month, co-creating on specific projects. The intensive week in Ghent is the physical moment where teams of students and staff meet.

The Faculty of Engineering Technology has made a strategic choice involving this blended mobility. “This format can function as complementary to the traditional student exchanges”, says Prof. Van der Perre. “This type of collaboration allows students and staff who – for whichever reason – are not able to participate in longer mobility periods, to join in meaningful international activities.”

Both Prof. Van der Perre and Simon Ravyts are eager to go and teach in other EUCLIDES network intensive programmes in future editions.

Hilde Lauwereys

www.kuleuven.be/campussen/technologiecampus-gent