Institutional Change Strategies to PBL and ESD

There has been a societal request for new engineering competences and, thus, implicitly a change in both curriculum and pedagogy in engineering education. This has been a global trend in the US, Europe, Australia and now emerging in the rest of the world. At the policy level, accreditation has pointed at much more outcome based education with emphasize on knowledge and skills. At the institutional level, engineering education has responded by implementation of new teaching and learning methodologies. However, the application of new teaching and learning methods have been implemented in many different ways and the research question leading the research is to identify multiple change strategies applied at the institutional level. This research project aims for an understanding and conceptualization of the institutional response strategies.

A preliminary framework form the starting point for the research project based on three complementary curriculum strategies: an add-on strategy, an integration strategy or a re-building strategy. The three different strategies involve different types of re-designing processes of curricula and lead to different learning outcomes.

The expected outcome is to contribute to institutional change processes by identification of multiple response strategies that are based on both management decisions as well as academic faculty decisions; however the implications for using the various strategies are very different in terms of system change, role of disciplines, leader interventions and faculty development strategies. Furthermore, institutions might use all types of response strategies in different programs and in different semesters. The conceptual framework serves as analytical anchors hopefully creating more awareness of the complexity of systemic change.
Empirically, qualitative data will be collected from actors involved in the change process especially to understand the motivation and individual drive for change in combination with an organisational drive.