With Challenge-Based Learning (CBL), universities aim to explicitly contribute to societal challenges, mostly involving moral dilemmas. As such, students, teachers, university management, and external stakeholders get morally involved in societal innovations. We analyze the existing CBL literature on this involvement in three dimensions, e.g., personal, interpersonal, and collective. We find that all three levels are present but that the criticality needed for societal challenges is discussed less explicitly in the CBL ethics literature. As a first step to answer this gap, we explore instances of how CBL programs of Mbarara University of Science and Technology (Uganda), Eindhoven University of Technology (the Netherlands), and Tecnóloglco de Monterrey (Mexico) are confronted and deal with this criticality. We conclude that it is fruitful for further research to look into the strengths of CBL to engage students in real-life moral experiences continuously and that more research on critical morality at the personal, interpersonal, and collective dimensions is necessary for CBL as a pedagogical method for universities to contribute to societal challenges.

Designing qualitative reflection in (first-year’s) engineering (ethics) education is challenging. We developed a reflection activity in a challenge-based learning course, based on three open questions, a weekly coaching session and a weekly coaching assignment. We use two models (ethics goals model and pedagogical component model) to analyze (1) what the effectiveness is of the reflection method, (2) how the students’ learning gains are distributed in this reflection, and (3) what the usefulness of these models is to analyze the reflection of a CBL course. We conducted a qualitative analysis, where data were drawn from weekly reflections written by 41 students participating in the course E3Challenge2. Using the text-search query by ATLAS.ti, we identified 180 relevant excerpts about ethics and 34 about coaching. Through an iterative and collaborative process, the excerpts were analyzed thematically and categorized under 12 themes describing students’ attainment of ethics learning goals. We describe (1) that the method provided in-depth reflections of the students but is not scalable, (2) a distribution of different ethics goals, and (3) strengths and gaps (epistemology, pedagogical) of the two models in the use of reflective evaluation. We conclude with a plea to use the models in evaluation of reflection methods and with possible further research for the ethics goal model.

Challenge-Based Learning (CBL) is an active-learning pedagogy increasingly used in Engineering Education to prepare students for their future careers by emphasizing knowledge acquisition and application and developing disciplinary and transdisciplinary skills. The purpose of this study is to describe the implementation of a CBL course, guided by the spiderweb curriculum framework, for first-year engineering students from different disciplines and explore students’ perceptions of factors that facilitated or inhibited their learning. We analyzed the results of the formal course evaluation consisting of a survey and two open-ended questions. In addition, we conducted 16 individual interviews after the end of the course. Results indicated that students appreciated the real-life aspect of the challenge, and a client’s involvement enhanced their engagement to the challenge and made their learning relevant. On the other hand, students seemed to find the course structure quite complicated, with many meetings during the week, several communication platforms, and the distribution of individual and group work for the final assignment. Lessons learned and future directions for practice and research are discussed.

Challenge-based learning (CBL) is an educational method in which an external stakeholder (company, community, NGO, …) brings in a real-life complex problem. CBL becomes increasingly popular in engineering education in general. The application of CBL in engineering ethics education, however, is lacking behind, as it requires specific design specifications. An ethics CBL course has commonalities with CBL courses without specific ethics learning goals, but they also need specific considerations in the design. A structural approach how and why to apply CBL in engineering ethics education is needed, both from an educational research and educational support perspective. This contribution will explore this gap. With the research questions: "What are particularities of CBL pedagogies in engineering ethics education?" These pedagogies will be described by using van den Akker’s spider-web curriculum model and Ethics Goal Model. We describe specificities for CBL engineering ethics courses for the different course components. We conclude that the tension between structured and open CBL approaches is crucial and that more research can be done in the different curriculum aspects described in the model of van den Akker.