Digitalization is the ongoing trend of recent years. It covers all areas of business, society and research. This paper makes a contribution to that discourse focusing on engineering education research and practice. The contribution aims at generating new insights in a threefold way: (1) by analyzing the significance of digitalization in the research area, (2) by describing an example of the implementation of digital methods in education practice, and (3) by presenting the theoretical and methodological framework of a course that covers the digital transformation and backlash effects on society. This approach generates empirically grounded knowledge on the state-of-The-Art and contributes to the translation of engineering education research to practice.