Educating Sustainable Engineers: From Batch Processing to Personalized Education

Current methods of educating engineering students are becoming increasingly obsolete given the increasing complexity of the anthropogenic world, demands for engineers to better understand the social and environmental context within which they function, and changes in student cognitive patterns arising from technologies such as Google (tm) and social networking services.  A successful response by educators requires not just incremental improvements in existing programs, but fundamental changes, enabled by technology, in the way education is conceptualized. Without such a response, the ability of society to continue to innovate in order to adapt to the more rapidly changing institutional, technological, economic, environmental and social conditions that characterize the Anthropocene will be jeopardized.