NORDIC COURSE DEVELOPMENT COOPERATION IN AN EMERGING FIELD OF ENGINEERING

Four decades ago, a specific engineering BSc study program in Fire Safety Engineering was formed at Lund University, Sweden, and several Nordic universities have since included courses on such subjects in their own BSc og MSc programmes. The field of fire safety engineering encompasses topics from a wide range of engineering disciplines, including mathematics, physics, chemistry and advanced engineering courses such as heat transfer, thermodynamics and fluid dynamics. It is not immediately obvious how to balance the need for knowledge from fundamental, applied and specific courses to be taught within the discipline of fire safety engineering. Long standing cooperation across 12 Nordic universities and research institutions has made this distinction clearer and most recently this network secured Nordic funding for three years for a specific cooperation program in education, including PhD exchange programs and the development of a summer school for students of engineering, focusing on fire safety and energy. Specifically, four of these universities, through the authors of this paper, have been cooperating for a number of years within one of the key courses called "Enclosure Fire Dynamics", the study of how a fire develops in a building and how engineering methods based on classical physics and chemistry can be used to simulate the environment due to fire, allowing engineers and designers to test and compare various possible design solutions regarding building fire safety. This has required careful development of educational material in close cooperation between Nordic universities, following the CDIO principles. The fruitful cooperation has resulted in the production of comprehensive educational material such as textbooks, homework assignments, laboratory instructions and computer labs, to name a few examples of results. Most of the material is free of charge and available on the internet. This paper provides an example of how this has been achieved by a cross-Nordic collaboration on providing and developing educational material in an emerging engineering discipline.