Jumpstart sustainability in seminars: hands-on experiences in class

Abstract

Sustainability in its different aspects is hardly addressed in software engineering education, neither as quality objective of system development nor in business process design. Consequently, students tend to be unaware of this concept and are not considering sustainability as an important aspect of systems development. This results in the development of (environmentally or socially) suboptimal solutions---although information and communication technology systems could offer great support in promoting and enabling sustainability in our society. To unlock this potential, we are sensitizing students for the issue by gradually introducing the concept in the curriculum. In this paper, we report on experiences in establishing sustainability in the software engineering curriculum of Bachelor and Master students by means of designated interactive seminars. A guideline on how to establish similar teaching activities concludes the paper.