Where have all the inventors gone? Fostering creativity in engineering education with remote lab learning environments

Creativity has been proclaimed as one of the key 21st century skills. Facing tremendous problems, creativity and innovation were seen at the key factors of a knowledge-based society, able to cope with ongoing and future problems. Engineers play an important role in addressing these challenges. Their ideas, their inventions, their creativity have brought Europe´s prosperity, and it will depend on their inventions and creativity to ensure that progress in the future. This raises the question in what way universities contribute to educate creative engineers nowadays. The slightly provoking essay will present results of a pre-study on fostering creativity in higher engineering education, conducted in the funded German project: “ELLI-Excellent Teaching and Learning in Engineering Education”, and will discuss the remote lab approach of the finished EU-project “PeTEX-Platform for E-Learning and Telemetric Experimentation” as good practice example. It resumes with open questions addressing relevant future educational and socio-economic impacts.