Building Future Skills in Higher Education: An International Blended Project Seminar on Sustainable Development

In the 21st century, higher education faces a multitude of challenges. Study programs need to contribute to solving the complex issues around sustainable development our societies urgently need to deal with on a global scale. On the one hand, this implies that study programs should integrate Education for Sustainable Development into their teaching whatever the core domain of the program may be. On the other hand, study programs should enable students to acquire so called Future Skills. These skills include, amongst others, skills such as self-initiative, autonomous learning competence, creativity, digital literacy, coping with uncertainty as well as cooperation and communications skills. At the same time, higher education needs to capitalize on new learning and teaching formats, brought about by widespread digitalization. These formats enhance flexibility of time and location and thus cater to broader target groups than the traditional student groups. Yet another desideratum for higher education is internationalization so that students adopt an international global citizen perspective on their specific domains. Against this backdrop, in this paper we describe and analyse an innovative educational design of an international seminar on the Sustainable Development Goals as a case study. Key element of the educational design is students’ work on project tasks in international multidisciplinary teams. Students collaborate first online and then share their work on-site, amongst other activities. This educational design strives to contribute to all goals mentioned above. The results of this paper can inform higher education decision-makers and educational designers alike.