Over the last eight years, ETH Week has given over 1,200 students the chance to meet and network with experts from science, industry, and the public sector. In its place, PBLabs will enable project-based education (PBE) across the university.
ETH Week was a six-day interdisciplinary course open to all Bachelor’s and Master's students at ETH Zurich. Every year around 150 participants split into teams to tackle a specific problem and develop a solution related to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). After eight editions dealing with topics such as food, water, energy, and health, as well as the future of cities and the circular economy, it was recently announced that this format would be discontinued. ETH Week 2023: Circular Realities was the last edition.
Students were split into interdisciplinary teams and supported by dedicated coaches with expertise in the areas of design thinking and systems thinking. The problem-oriented process gave participants plenty of inspiration and ideas through lectures, presentations, field trips, and a Knowledge Fair. Students also had a rare opportunity to engage with leading experts and change makers. The teams presented their solutions to an audience on the last day.
Promoting interdisciplinary dialogue in a project format
ETH Week showed the potential of project-based education for fostering a broad range of competencies and led to many innovations in educational development. Catharina Bening, Senior Researcher with SusTec and Lead for the Circular Realities topic team at this year’s ETH Week, comments: “The experience at ETH Week has motivated us even further to create teaching offerings that not only cater to the different disciplines of students but also combine and explore expertise from different departments.”
PBLabs: promoting transferable competencies
As of next year, ETH Week will be replaced by PBLabs, a new strategic initiative launched by the Rectorate to increase the proportion of project-based education in the ETH curriculum. PBLabs provides a range of offers and resources to support lecturers, educational developers, and departments wanting to implement the relevant PBE formats. The goal is to help encourage innovation in teaching at ETH Zurich and foster graduates’ transferable competencies. PBLabs therefore acts as a bridge between fully structured departmental courses and the Student Project House, where students are free to direct their own work.
Florian Rittiner, Head of PBLabs, stresses that the decision to discontinue ETH Week does not make project-based learning and the promotion of transferable competencies any less important: “On the contrary: the Rectorate wants as many students as possible to benefit from project-based education.” To achieve this goal, scalability is a crucial aspect that was absent in ETH Week. PBLabs can achieve more if resources can be concentrated on supporting lecturers across the entire university in implementing project-based education.
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