2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper describes the background and creation of a professional development training course, which uses as its starting point materials, resource use and emissions caused by product components and their lifecycles. Originally, it was five weekly online 3-hour sessions under the title Sustainable Development within Industrial Production. This online version is compared to a version for in-person training, developed for events on location Lunch-to-Lunch, of near identical content. The main session titles of both courses, with strong materials components and engineering focus, were:
• Climate Change and UN Sustainable Development Goals
• Materials and the Environment
• Transport and Environmental Technology
• The Lifecycle Concept within Industrial Production
• Circular Economy and Course Wrap-Up

The results from six completed online courses with, in total around 120 participants, and four in-person events with, in total, more than 60 participants are reported. Both modes of teaching show great progress in terms of the self-assessed prior and final knowledge levels in (i) Sustainable Development (socially, economically, ecologically); (ii) Environmental Issues (pollution, climate, energy); and a moderate increase even in (iii) Industrial Production knowledge (engineering, economics, logistics). Since the company in question is active in industrial production, the participants were expected to be quite knowledgeable in this area already. The content was clearly materials-based due to its context, despite these classifications.

When the coronavirus pandemic hit, 2020-2022, it forced many Universities world-wide to reduce or modify their teaching almost overnight. It brought forward a transition towards online and remote education that had slowly been gaining ground since the development of internet. In the case of professional development, training courses in-person can benefit bonding and team building, but remote working conditions and globalization now makes this form of interaction increasingly difficult. Online educational solutions with real-time zoom-type sessions are a sort of compromise, one step closer to live interaction than, say, fully automated digital or AI-based individual training packages. In this study, we try to use experiences and self-assessment surveys to learn more about the pros and cons of an online training course and compare it with an in-person version of very similar content. The results indicate that the self-assessed increase in course-related knowledge, at least in the short term, is even better in-person than online.