Bridging the Gap Between Engineering Education and Industrial Practice: A Project-Driven Model for the Cleaner Production Audit Course

The disconnection between engineering education and industrial practice remains a persistent challenge, particularly in practice-oriented courses such as cleaner production audit. In such courses, students often lack exposure to the incomplete data, organizational constraints, and multi-stakeholder interactions that characterize real enterprise settings. This study developed a project-based teaching model grounded in industry–university collaboration for the cleaner production audit course. The model was implemented across four rounds of teaching from 2021 to 2025, involving 267 students. The reform addressed teaching objectives, content, methods, evaluation, and faculty team. The analysis was descriptive in nature. Results indicate that students showed improvements in audit task performance and judgment quality, and that their recognition of the strategic importance of cleaner production increased. Student confidence in applying audit methods increased by 24 percentage points, and graduate employment rates in environment-related positions rose from 72% to 86%. Over 80% of students recognized the strategic value of cleaner production in course evaluation surveys and expressed willingness to apply what they learned in future careers. These findings offer preliminary evidence that project-based, industry-integrated teaching can bridge the gap between academic training and industrial demands in practice-oriented engineering courses, and provide a potential pathway for aligning engineering education with sustainability goals.