Passing our students while we fail upwards: 45th Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education

CSU Engineering University introduced its radical new Civil Engineering degree in 2016. The program (described in full elsewhere) was deliberately designed to eschew the traditional lecture-lab-model of engineering education, and instead focus on training student engineers in an authentic and actual engineering work environment. The program was built upon a strong foundation of engineering educational research from around the globe, with clearly identified best practices being woven together to form the CSU Engineering curriculum. Each of the pieces was chosen for its proven impact in its original environment; with the challenge for CSU Engineering being how to make the integration of these pieces work without the underlying traditional environment. While the overall program rollout was a success, there were a number of mistakes made along the way; this paper highlights some of our key learnings, and the improvements made for the second year to overcome them.