The course “Life Cycle Assessment of Products and Systems” has been a first mover and a leader at DTU in addressing the topic of sustainability. It has been developed over a period of 25 years with increasing popularity and impact.
The course started in 1997 with just 23 master students and has now 231 master students from mainly five DTU study programmes.
“The course receives consistently excellent student evaluations and is an outstanding example of the high-quality teaching delivered at DTU, says Dean of Graduate Studies Philip Binning. He adds:
“This course has also tackled the difficult issue of how to up-scale to large numbers of students while maintaining very high quality. Subsequently, the course has served as a recruitment channel for later master’s theses and PhD students at DTU.”
Learning by doing
The students on the course collaborate closely with industrial companies, organizations, and institutions on solving real-life cases. The students are actively engaged and learn efficiently how to perform a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), while the collaborating companies often get useful insights into their analyzed case studies.
The team of educators behind the course consists of Professor Peter Fantke, Professor Michael Hauschild, Professor Olivier Jolliet, Associate Professor Alexis Laurent, Associate Professor Stig Irving Olsen and Senior Researcher Mikolaj Owsianiak. All from Section for Quantitative Sustainability Assessment (QSA) at DTU Sustain.
For Associate Professor Alexis Laurent, who has played an integral part in the course since 2009 and witnessed its growth and development, receiving the recognition is a proud moment:
“It takes a lot of resources and dedication to coordinate such a course. Just this semester, 231 students have run 55 real-life case studies in collaboration with external partners. In that respect, the prize is a recognition of all the efforts by the successive course responsible, lecturers, teaching assistants and supporting staff who helped nurture and develop the course over the last 25 years”, says Alexis Laurent.
The prize was awarded at DTU's teaching seminar on Friday, September 22, 2023.
