This work is about sustainability-related learning experiences for the discipline of supply chain management (SCM) in Higher Education. It arises from the need to motivate students with relevant and interesting activities to improve their learning performance. Higher Education must respond to dynamic demands to keep impactful topics for students, organizations, and society over time. This work addresses the relevance of contemporary challenges in real-world SCM situations concerning Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It also provides an actionable framework integrating experiential learning ideas, the ADDIE model for instructional design, the Triple Bottom Line for sustainability, the continuous improvement cycle, and the SDGs into an SCM model. In a case study, the article illustrates the use of this framework for instructional design in a learning experience from an undergraduate course in an Industrial and Systems Engineering program. The application describes the impact of food ecosystems on cities and communities during the COVID-19 crisis. The results suggest positive attainment levels in students’ learning outcomes and highly favorable opinions regarding learning relevance, interest, motivation, and the recommendation of the course. Therefore, this work contributes to SCM education by including sustainability-related challenges and disciplinary topics in novel instructional designs that will actively prepare future professionals and decision-makers.

This research paper presents a proposal for a learning model that extends the availability of resources for training and development of professional skills in the field of Lean Manufacturing. This research arises due to the lack and current limitations of effective teaching models for the development of professional competencies. The importance of this educational innovation proposal lies in being a unique reference frame of its type. This offers cutting-edge methods for optimization and process improvement tools, while developing general and disciplinary competencies in the area of industrial engineering. The notion of learning is presented in a context of real-world experiences to develop relevant competencies in real businesses settings for manufacturing and services. This work presents a literature review on competency-based education, experiential learning and challenge-based learning. Therefore, a background explanation of the proposed learning model and a learning space called Lean-Thinking-Learning Space are elaborated. Additionally, an experiment carried out to measure the development of competencies is showed in terms of comparing the teaching results of a course in two different learning spaces; namely, a traditional classroom and the proposed experiential learning space. The results of this investigation reflect an increase of 29% in the level of attainment of competencies observed in the experiential learning space proposed in this research work.