Workshop on Responsible Education in Leuven, October 2015

Posted on 03/11/2015 by Joost Groot Kormelink

Introduction

To celebrate its 25^th anniversary, CESAER (Conference of European Schools for Advanced Engineering Education and Research) organized a conference titled Healthy living, healthy ageing – a challenge for medicine and engineering in Leuven on October 7, 2015. Part of the conference was a workshop on Responsible Research & Innovation organized by the TU Delft.
During this workshop we focused among other things on education in Responsible Innovation (RI)

Context

CESAER is a non-profit international association of leading European universities of science and technology and engineering schools/faculties at comprehensive universities and university colleges. The organisations CESAER stands for scientific excellence in engineering education and research, and the promotion of innovation through close cooperation with industry in order to ensure the application of cutting-edge knowledge in industry and society. CESAER was established in 1990 and now has a membership of 50 institutions from 24 countries. CESAER has a task force (http://www.cesaer.org/en/projects/responsible-research-and-innovation-rri/). The overall goal of the taskforce is to deepen our understanding of responsible innovation and contribute to inserting this idea in key places in society (universities, government bodies, industry, and funding agencies).

Workshop

During the workshop we discussed the following issues: (see also our presentation: Cesaser workshop.final. )

What does an engineer need to know about RRI?
How does this differ for the different type of engineers?
What is the most appropriate didactical approach?
Can we build up a repository for the content including best practices?
How should we train professionals?

We used self-driving vehicles as running example (see this MOOC-video by professor Bert van Wee (Transport Policy at Delft University of Technology). Noteworthy from the workshop is that awareness is still a very an important issue! RI is not easy to define, at the same time you know what RI is if you see it!