Toward an agile pedagogical strategy for the COVID-19 era: A case study of teaching sustainability topics

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Students' engagements and creating an effective learning experience in the classroom are essential in active educational strategies. Flexibility and adoption of new learning technologies play a critical role during the pandemic. Different active pedagogical strategies enhance students’ learning experiences on the online platforms. The lecturers should be dynamic and flexible, in terms of using hybrid strategies, to optimize this experience. Teaching sustainability courses require innovative teaching styles for encouraging students for active engagement, as well as collaboration, and participation of different stakeholders. This study presents the different teaching approaches for a graduate course in an engineering school during the pandemic. It shows how the combination of case studies, simulation, class guests, and Q&A on a virtual whiteboard could improve students' engagement in a sustainable production course. Kolb’s learning model is used to show the advantages of the proposed approach. As the teaching approaches are evolving, as the result of digital transformation, the future perspectives in the post-pandemic period are also discussed.