The co-created nZEBRA course at Halmstad University
State of the art
At a glance on technical universities in Europe there seems to be a common way of organizing courses either on construction or energy. Very few, if any, do combine construction and energy holistically including environmental, social, and technical aspects. Energy engineering and energy systems programmes focus on the supply side of energy and almost never on the user side. In construction programmes there are courses in mechanical systems such as ventilation, but no courses on energy use in a holistic aspect described above. This defines a need.
To meet the need nZEBRA project aims to develop an intensive blended course on Climate neutral buildings. Interdisciplinary and challenge based in its nature, it seeks to empower Master students in architecture, civil and energy engineering and similar to design innovative solutions for climate neutral building. It will address the labour market demand for high-qualified professionals in the field.
nZEBRA at Halmstad University
Our educational need is to have a course where construction and energy are systematically intertwined for sustainable building, energy management and for the future including BIM/BEM training. The students will benefit from the course by gaining capability to see “the whole picture” taking all sustainability aspects in consideration and innovating the concept further. It is not only about technical and environmental solutions. The students need to see social matters e. g. that they, actually, are a part of their colleagues working environment and need to understand and respect other knowledge and professions than their own. The course will hopefully show a path to good leadership. Hence, we want to focus also on the didactics and not only the pedagogical aspects of the course.
As the energy issue throughout Europe is topical with new forthcoming EU Directives, we need to speed up the work with energy efficient new building and renovation as well as increased use of renewable energy. The graduated students’ increased knowledge will contribute to society’s transformation towards sustainability with a broader educated workforce through specially educated professional leaders / engineers.
The nZEBRA course
We want to co-create a multidisciplinary course on Master level, with mixed groups of students from several engineering and architecture programmes as well as professionals from companies. We would like it to be an optional Summer School to start with, and with further development, after finishing the project period, it could be a mandatory course in the Master programme in energy smart innovation in the built environment. In addition, we also plan for arranging the course for distant learning using our software Blackboard, but with one or two occasions at the university. The nZEBRA course will, in Halmstad, be linked to the ECTS and have 7.5 or 15 credits with international accreditation as a Master course at Halmstad university and follow the quality assurance process.
In short, the course will have four objectives of which the methodological framework and the syllabus is the first one. Our course methodological framework will be co-created based on field study, online survey, focus groups and interviews. The course content will include theory, and CBL, challenge-based learning, and PBL, project-based learning as activating learning scenarios.
The second objective will be the theoretical parts followed by the implementation objective, number three, guidance of CBL and PBL scenarios. A train-the-trainer toolkit is introduced in objective four where the leaders learn how to implement knowledge and construction of climate neutral buildings in a company, possibly together with CSR, corporate social responsibility and ESG, environmental social governance, but definitely with climate calculations, BIM building information modelling and BEM building energy modelling and CBL pedagogy. This is how the nZEBRA project will meet the challenging climate neutral building by developing an intensive blended course in the field for professionals, architects and engineers at Halmstad university.
