This book brings together voices from across the international academic and professional community to explore one of the most pressing challenges facing technical higher education today: how to prepare students not simply to use new technologies, but to think, create, decide, and act responsibly in a rapidly changing world.
Through research, teaching experiences, experiments, and real-world projects, the contributors explore the transformation of education through artificial intelligence, BIM, digital twins, virtual and immersive environments, computational methods, robotics, project-based learning, physical modelling, living laboratories, service learning, and competency-based approaches.
Yet technology is only part of the story. The experiences gathered here place equal emphasis on critical thinking, creativity, collaboration, professional judgement, ethical responsibility, sustainability, and climate resilience. Authors show how learning can move beyond the traditional classroom-to laboratories, buildings, construction sites, cities, territories, and communities-where knowledge is tested through action and students become active participants in their own learning.
Organized around four interconnected themes-digital transformation and AI; innovative pedagogies and competency-based learning; applied learning for the built environment; and sustainability and climate resilience-this book offers a broad panorama of how technical education is evolving across different countries, institutions, and disciplines.
More than a collection of academic contributions, this book is a practical resource for educators. Drawing on teaching experiences developed across more than 40 universities, research centers, educational institutions, public administrations, and professional organizations in more than a dozen countries, it offers readers a diverse repertoire of approaches that can be examined, adapted, and applied to their own educational contexts.
Rather than proposing a single model, this book offers something more valuable: experiences to question, methods to adapt, ideas to combine, and new possibilities to explore. It is designed to encourage educators to experiment with new ways of connecting knowledge, technology, practice, and society.
