Educational Transformation

Abstract

What we have been addressing in the previous chapters is more fundamental change in engineering education from a disciplinary to an interdisciplinary learning discourse by applying more student centred learning methods which embrace generic competencies, interdisciplinary learning, and learning to work on boundaries in engineering education. But the big question is: how do we convince our colleagues of the need for change or transformation of engineering education?

1 Introduction

What we have been addressing in the previous chapters is more fundamental change in engineering education from a disciplinary to an interdisciplinary learning discourse by applying a series of boundary objects for students to learn to cross-disciplinary boundaries. We have also argued that boundary crossing embraces sets of generic and meta-competencies, which can be learned in one context but transformed into a new context. We have illustrated via concepts and will supplement by examples (see part 3) what this could look like in engineering education.

But what we have not touched upon is the following question: What does it take to transform existing practices to meet these new ideas? This question is especially relevant, as this is not about adding an extra course to an already heterogeneous and overloaded curriculum, and this is a not a question of faculties learning some extra tools. It is much more fundamental, as we need faculty to facilitate students’ learning processes both within and across boundaries, and we therefore need a cultural transformation among academic staff.

Most educational researchers or educational change agents who really have visions and ambitions to drive engineering education into a new era have experienced barriers and mistrust among engineering colleagues. Is this really necessary? Is this not what we are already doing? How can engineers learn fundamentals in projects? Would digital learning result in a superficial learning? These are just some of the questions asked and statements formulated.

The previous chapters argue for more student-centered and active learning approaches combined with a broader contextualized and sustainable approach to student competencies. The student-centered approach has been on the agenda for several decades, and experience clearly indicates how difficult academic change is. Reviews of the implementation of problem- and project-based learning (PBL) in engineering education clearly show that PBL is applied within the discipline/course structure and less in interdisciplinary relations across disciplines or courses (Chen et al., 2021). Experiences also indicate that this has not been a process of speedy change; on the contrary, the need for more student-centered learning has been on the agenda for the last 25 years, supported by accreditation criteria for more outcome-based education and the need for professional competencies, such as teamwork and project management. (Hadgraft & Kolmos, 2020).

Comparing the change process of student-centered learning to the recent application of digitalization in teaching and learning, there is a significant difference. Kotter (1995) defined eight phases of organizational change, of which the first was the lack of urgency for change. Following that reasoning, the COVID-19 situation has created urgency, and what had not been possible to accomplish with respect to the use of digital means before was now implemented overnight. The education system was in shock, and very soon, both Teams, Zoom, and other systems were developed further to support classroom learning.

This fast change gave some experience; however, the experience of spring 2020 really needed to be reflected upon and developed further, and number of studies has grown rapidly in the last two years (Adedoyin & Soykan, 2020). For many teachers without experience in applying digital means in teaching, the most natural thing to do was to lecture in Teams or Zoom, which is not the optimal use of these systems. It takes time to identify the advantages in a blended learning system; however, there are experiences to build on. With respect to how this will impact education systems in the future, we still have to wait and see, but it will never go back to what it was before COVID-19, as there will be the footprints of COVID-19 at all levels, from the individual university teacher to the political level.

The political level has responded to the digital change in lifelong learning. Micro-credentials, as shorter digitalized units offering formal credits, are emphasized as part of a flexibility strategy and focus on lifelong learning, and this represents a shift in view of lifelong learning to a personal learning track, replacing or enhancing more formal education (Resei et al., 2019). During the pandemic, this has been further enforced, but it will not be without consequences for curricular coherence (Wheelahan & Moodie, 2021). However, there is still a need for offering minor units in formats as micro-credentials, which, as digital learning, also has the advantage of being able to reach out to a much broader group of people across national and cultural borders. Thus, higher education has new ways for both reaching out to companies and their continuing learning but also internally in applying online courses from other universities.

Digital transformation has changed the landscape of engineering education and is having a profound impact on engineering methodologies and how engineering is taught and learned. Some of the ways digital transformation is impacting engineering technologies, such as simulations, and others are related to methods and processes.

Simulations: Digital simulations are becoming increasingly common in engineering education, enabling students to conduct experiments and simulations in a virtual environment. This allows students to gain hands-on experience in a safe and controlled environment, without the need for expensive equipment or specialized facilities.

Online Learning: This method had been well discussed. Digital transformation had enabled the growth of online learning. Online learning allows students to access course materials and lectures at their own pace and on their own schedule, making it easier for students to balance their studies with other commitments.

Collaborative Tools: Digital tools are making it easier for students to collaborate on engineering projects, both with their peers and with professionals in the industry. This enables students to gain a deeper understanding of engineering practices and to develop real-world skills.

Access to Resources: Digital transformation has made it easier for students to access a wide range of resources, including online journals, databases, and research papers. This enables students to stay up to date with the latest developments in engineering and to conduct research on their own.

Digital technologies in content and methods became foundational for several aspects of education and created mindsets. When we include AI to the mix of digital technologies, we realize that the digital transformation is not complete yet, and more changes are heading our way. The importance of AI and its impact had been discussed in Chap. 5.

From practice point of view, we find that different universities have different approaches to utilizing digital technologies and examples of these will be discussed in Part III of this book.

Digitalization raises new needs and offers new opportunities. The new needs are to activate students behind their screens and create supportive learning environments to overcome the lack of a physical learning environment. For this, PBL and other forms of active learning can be of great value, and new opportunities are given to develop engineering education to embrace complex problem analysis and problem solving in an international and blended mode.

Urgency is one of the significant differences between student-centered learning and digitalization. Even if it can be argued that PBL and other active learning methodologies are needed, there has been no explicit urgency related to PBL. There has been a societal call for more employability, relevant competencies and, in particular, for students to learn to apply their academic knowledge. It has never felt as dramatic as during the life-threatening pandemic situation, which hopefully the world will not experience again, but we need to look into how to motivate faculty and lead educational change. Climate change is life-threatening, but it is not experienced as being as dangerous as the pandemic situation in daily life; however, there is an urgency to find ways to motivate educational change in order to embrace complexity and the development of competencies and knowledge to deal with the SDGs.

In this chapter, we present new viewpoints on faculty motivation and educational leadership. We take three university modes embracing ideal types of academic knowledge perspectives and societal values as the point of departure (Jamison et al., 2014). These modes frame types of curriculum changes, the necessity of educational leadership, and pedagogical development among faculty as shown in Table 8.1.

Table 8.1 Three university modes and strategies

2 University Modes and Faculty Motivation

The driver for becoming academic staff/faculty at a university is mostly the urge to dig deep into a problem or subject. It is the knowledge-driven desire which is basic. However, there is not one category of academic knowledge which can cover a content-based motivation; this will depend on the knowledge mode, values, the embedded mindset, and the perception of what engineering is. Faculty development has focused on the learning and teaching methodologies and has hardly addressed the content, which might be one of the reasons for hesitation among faculty (Fig. 8.1).

Fig. 8.1

University views

Jamison et al. (2014) defined three knowledge modes: the academic, the market-driven, and the hybrid learning mode. These modes frame the SDGs, system, and design approaches combined with societal and human values. The academic mode is oriented to theory and to learning the fundamentals—the basic sciences—like mathematics and physics. In the European tradition, the first years of study are dominated by theoretical courses.

Of course, an engineer needs to know mathematics and physics, but there is still the question of scope and its relation to other disciplines, which will suggest to students that engineering is more than the application of scientific theory, which is the widespread assumption reflected broadly in the literature (Arthur, 2009). The consequence for the engineering curriculum is most often that students need to learn basic science and to understand the theoretical foundation of engineering before going into any application or problem-solving process. This is a sequential or hierarchical organization of knowledge—it is necessary to first understand theory before understanding context or practice.

In the book Nature of Technology, Brian Arthur gives new perspectives on technology and thereby engineering (Arthur, 2009). He finds that much of technology’s evolution is based on a new combination of already-known technologies. Arthur argues that it is not only technology that uses science to evolve; the development of science is also dependent on technology, e.g., the steam engine came before thermodynamics. This approach determines the interdependence of science and technology and also that there exists an interactive process between science and engineering—you need to understand the underlying principles and also the problems with the existing technology practices. This is a much more interactive learning process, in which practice can lead to understanding the need for theory and vice versa.

The market-driven mode takes problems and issues in companies as its point of departure and is a much more a pragmatic mode oriented toward industry and a systems approach. Whereas the academic mode can settle for knowledge, industry aims for products and combinations of technology and knowledge. It involves systems and design processes, and graduates should be ready for working in industry and be able to understand business models as systems and boundaries for their work. There are expectations regarding collaboration in various teams and the ability to communicate with various groups, from laymen to experts. Contrary to the academic paradigm, the underlying value is much more that it should work and that there is a sufficient economic bottom line. It can be argued from an academic point of view that this approach is too instrumental, as it only tries to satisfy current needs; however, it comes as no surprise that this is the condition for companies.

In engineering education, there are tensions between the two approaches within programs and among disciplines. Some engineering programs seem to be more oriented to companies, like mechanical engineering, civil engineering, and production, whereas other programs like biotechnology and energy, are typically more oriented to theoretical knowledge (Routhe et al., 2021). There are, however, a few disciplines which do not develop quickly, but most engineering disciplines are continuously developing, e.g., with energy, the thermodynamics is the same, but the construction of the wind turbines will change, and the implementation of wind turbines will require a systems approach. If we look at biotechnology, the foundation will be there, but now big data can lead to new insights.

Engineering can be understood as being bound to two poles: On the one side, there is the theoretical scientific understanding, and on the other side, the more pragmatic approach. Engineering is not a case of either/or but both/and, and engineering education will have to embrace both dimensions. Engineering students should learn to be in both modes; it does not make sense to run academic and theoretical programs exclusively or, on the other hand, only programs on the application of technology. It is critical to understand both the technology and the underlying mechanism in, e.g., software algorithms, design methods, or complex problem identification and solving.

The hybrid learning mode is the third mode with an orientation toward society, emphasizing competencies, cultural awareness, sustainability, professional identities, and citizenship, which are very much the same as the ideal formulated in the first parts of this book and which are facilitated by student-centered, collaborative, and situated learning in a variety of projects. This book points in this direction where engineers have diverse understandings of engineering and can move between academic and market-driven modes and bring this to a societal and community context, with an understanding of variation and hybridization.

The hybrid learning mode is based on a combination of the academic and the market-driven modes and represents a much more value-driven and critical approach. It involves a perception of engineering as system and design processes involving a stakeholder perspective and the process of bridging theory and practice. In engineering education, students will need to learn how to design using problem identification, identification of needed disciplines, and technology development frameworks. It is also a value-driven mode in the sense that the sustainability and the SDG agenda will constitute the underlying values. The SDGs comprehend the north/south dimension, which addresses the unequal distribution of wealth in the world along with a lot of other dimensions. The development and application of technology are therefore seen in a much broader societal perspective, creating a vision and an ideal of a better world, to which engineers can contribute. Taking the great powers into consideration, and all the conflicts and potential wars, this might seem like a naive mindset; however, even the most powerful actors need strategies for climate change and stable markets. No matter the political standpoint, there is a common interest in addressing the SDGs for future global development. The sustainability mindset does exist among most academics and the academic development should focus on ways to address sustainability in the teaching and learning practices.

3 Curriculum Change Strategies

Curriculum strategies will depend on national policies, and there are systems in which the curriculum is coordinated at a central government level, even for higher education (Kolmos et al., 2016). This leaves minimal space for any change, and this is not what we are thinking of; on the contrary, we think of curricula which are run by institutions under consideration of accreditation criteria. Most institutions do have elements of all modes in their curricula, but they might not be integrated, or a strategy might not be implemented as a result of the academic staff’s influence on the curriculum from a bottom-up perspective. At the ideal level, however, the various curriculum strategies would include a balanced mix of modes.

In recent years, more and more universities have declared themselves as mission-driven universities. This can be an institutional response to the SDG challenges and other grand challenges. In Europe, it is also a response to the EU research programs, which are mission driven (Mazzucato, 2018) and in line with notions of an ecological university, which has a north/south collaboration based on sustainability values (Barnett, 2011). This provides a direction for change for universities, a path on which many institutions already have taken the initial steps. However, the declared mission-driven universities will be facing ethical dilemmas with a new period of cold war. Arguments such as defending democratic values together with equity in society might be added to the pamphlet of sustainability actions.

Most universities are chiefly in the academic mode, where the curriculum normally consists of several courses or modules. Some of these courses are obligatory, and some are electives, which give the students the chance to create their own specialization throughout the curriculum. For the academic mode, as an ideal category, the add-on strategy is the most widespread. If there are new requirements for the curriculum, such as team skills, the normal procedure will be to establish a new course elective, so the students have the possibility to participate. This is an individual approach, as different kinds of electives can be combined according to how the individual learner creates their learning trajectory. The disadvantage is that it will also be the learner who must create the coherence among the curriculum modules, which is not always so easy. There might be design courses with interdisciplinary collaboration, but these are more single glue elements in a predominantly modular system.

For the teaching and learning methodologies, there has been significant incorporation of active learning methodologies. But, again, these changes mostly happen within the modules or courses and not normally as a comprehensive institutional strategy. This is reflected in the extensive reporting on PBL and active learning experiments in the literature at the course level (Chen et al., 2021). As the learning activities do not cross existing subject boundaries, the problems that students face are most often academic problems within disciplines. These will be predesigned by the faculty. This strategy will work for individual academics, as it necessitates only small changes to the curriculum. If there is a requirement for interdisciplinary competencies, it will be captured by establishing some interdisciplinary courses.

The two other strategies require a systemic approach with a high level of coordination at the system level and educational leadership. The integration strategy can be exemplified by the conceive-design-implement-operate (CDIO) community. CDIO contains a long list of standards covering the system level, including quality assurance and academic development, the integration of skills and competencies into the curriculum and, at a minimum, the integration of real-life projects—mostly company projects—where students learn to conceive, design, implement, and operate within the framing of the engineering profession (Crawley et al., 2014; Edström & Kolmos, 2014).

The rebuilding of curricula concerns a restructuring of the entire institution by establishing a new program. The rebuilding strategy emphasizes the societal context and involves restructuring courses, allowing for all types of active learning, including more open-ended projects. Progression through an entire program involves an emphasis on both technical knowledge and competencies and professional or employability competencies. Such a change will require strong institutional support from the highest level of the university and educational leadership that is able to facilitate a collective institutional vision and motivation for change. Academic development will concern not only the individual but also a high degree of collaboration across disciplinary boundaries. There will be a need for scholarly teachers who can think outside of traditional boundaries and facilitate transformation processes.

Both the integration and the rebuilding strategy will require strong educational leadership, which will have to be adapted to the actual curriculum. There will be differences in the specific activities depending on the characteristics of the performing curriculum. Basically, there are three different starting points for transformation in curricula:

• No or minor experience with cross-disciplinary curricula and generic competencies, meaning that a few teachers may have experimented with new teaching and learning methods. These activities are under the radar of top management.

• Sporadic experience with cross-disciplinary curricula and generic competencies at the course level and with positive feedback from top management.

• Systemic experience with cross-disciplinary curricula at a department, program, or institutional level and, of course, with support from top management but still with the need for further development.

These three types of experiences with more student-centered learning require different types of activities. In the first, institutions will need to create experiences and trust for these new ways of teaching and learning, and there is a need for educating the faculty. The education or ‘training’ needs to be contextualized and rooted in a broad disciplinary domain, with possibilities to plan and run experiments in practice. Academics need to experience and trust new ways of teaching and learning. If it is a first meeting with, for example, team-based project work, it takes time to understand that these new practices can lead to both deep disciplinary learning as well as to a broad understanding of societal problems.

For the second category with some experience, institutions will have some academic staff with experience and possibly an understanding of how to create variation in the student-centered learning methodologies; there will, however, also be a group without experience. This stage is normally a result of a longer period in which the management has encouraged academic staff to experiment with their teaching, and it is has slowly spread to more and more courses. However, there is no overview of what kind of learning methodologies are used, and thus there is no clear progression throughout the curriculum. The need for these types of institutions is much more to map existing practices and create an overview of possible progression both for generic competencies and for disciplinary knowledge. Institutional strategies can then be created to support new cross-disciplinary competencies within the curriculum.

For the third category, institutions do practice PBL at a systemic level, involving both an overview of learning methodologies and progression. However, no matter the degree of implementation at a systemic level, there is always the danger that institutions are stiffening the boundaries. For these types of institutions, there is a need for exchanging, evaluating, and proceeding. It might seem hard to initiate further change in this type of institution compared to those with less experience. On the other hand, it is extremely important that institutions do continuous development of all educations, not only in terms of minor adjustments, but indeed to facilitate more basic paradigm shifts.

No matter the curriculum strategy, there is a need for educational leadership which is more than the management of daily operations and facilitation of both top-down and bottom-up approaches, which are most efficient in combination.

4 Educational Leadership

In a conversation on educational leadership with a colleague, the following was said: ‘Things have changed. When I was head of the department 15 years ago, I was seen as the voice of the employees, my colleagues. But now I am seen as an instrument and mediator for the top management. That makes me sad, as this does not align with my idea of leadership.’

There is no doubt that in a change process, there is a need for both top-down and bottom-up processes, and to achieve educational change, there is a need for leadership. However, this quotation shows that it is a question of balance and being able to navigate on the edge of two directions, especially concerning educational change. There might be limited motivation among academic staff if they are told what to do. On the other hand, there might be lack of direction if there is no overall vision and plan. Visions and missions might create motivation.

Educational change must take place at the institutional level and will involve a shift in culture and understanding of learning among academic staff. Change in engineering education is often slow, and strategies should be applied to foster more rapid change. As culture plays an important role in the change process, a more experimental approach to teaching and learning is needed to create new, innovative learning environments. For that purpose, recognition of educational leadership, educational development, and academic staff development is needed, but it needs to be seen as leadership allowing bottom-up changes. Academics are, for the most part, demotivated by being told what to do and the ‘art’ of leadership involves both facilitating and supporting these experiments as well as engaging academics in creating a common vision (Drew, 2010).

Ruth Graham has pointed to the need for educational leadership as one of the essential elements in educational change (Graham, 2012, 2018b). National initiatives to reform engineering education have been seen in many countries, which frame the institutions’ directions for developing higher education. One example of national initiatives is a case from Chile, with a national top-down-driven change. Engineering education reform in Chile during the last ten years represents a change in the educational landscape, which has been transformed almost entirely from a lecture-based engineering curriculum to widespread university engagement with educational change. There have been two government interventions in higher education—MECESUP and Engineering 2030, from the Ministries of Education and Finance—for ambitious, systemic educational change across the country. The reform has argued for a national investment in technology innovation as a vehicle for economic growth, strong leadership from influential engineering schools across the country, and best practices from across the world. Strong leadership from both the government and key university leaders has motivated change; however, it remains to create a higher level of academic staff motivation for change, essential for change in the engineering classroom. With this reform, Chile has positioned itself as a leading nation for engineering education in the decades to come. The elements in the change cover the emergence of systemic change, problem- and project-based learning, technology-driven entrepreneurship and innovation, collaboration with industry, service learning, engineering design, and new working spaces for entrepreneurship and innovation. This government initiative is described in the report ‘Snapshot review of engineering education reform in Chile’ (Graham, 2017).

At the institutional level, elements such as vision, skills, incentives, resources, and action plans are necessary to create cultural change in higher education (Knoster et al., 2000). All these elements will require leadership, management, and the learning of new curriculum possibilities among academic staff. These organizational functions are present in most universities in the form of top management pointing out directions, program leaders managing daily activities, and an educational development unit offering courses to young academic staff. Nonetheless, there might not be a will or wish to change, maybe there is a lack of resources to change or there is a missing sense of urgency to move academia toward more mission- and challenge-driven universities.

A lot of curriculum changes have occurred because of existing academic staff who try out new teaching and learning methodologies that prove successful. The reporting on cases of active learning in the classroom is overwhelming in the conference literature and has also dominated the engineering education journals since the 1990s. These are the bottom-up initiatives, and research also indicates that successful leaders, who have managed to change a curriculum, normally have experimented several times in the classroom either before becoming a leader or as leader.

In the literature, we rarely hear about the failures, which is a shame, as it would make a space for sharing and conceptualizing the risks in any educational change process. It might be risky to change, and there is a lot at stake, as students need a guarantee that they will get a qualified degree. Many private universities are hesitant, as students and their parents are consumers. At many public universities, the funding is limited. Furthermore, accreditation systems can be both a barrier and a facilitator of change depending on national criteria and cultures. There is no recipe for reshaping and changing engineering education, and there is not one method which can be used everywhere. But what is common is that there is a need for leadership and an educational leadership system.

International university governance systems are quite different, as there are systems with government-appointed leaders, institutional-appointed leaders, and systems with elected leaders. There are advantages and disadvantages for all of these governance systems; however, educational leadership is mostly appointed at a lower level in the organization, and it is rare to see—if it exists at all—formal qualification criteria by virtue of formal education other than the disciplinary knowledge in the field. The most normal pattern is that the roles of educational leaders, such as vice-deans, department leaders, and study program leaders, are carried out by academics who have an interest in the field and might be interested in new innovations in education.

The mindset embedded in the three modes can therefore also characterize how leaders are thinking and what kind of visions and ideas they will have. For example, educational leadership within the academic mode will be to keep the changes within the existing structures, and the most dominant task will be to respond to external requirements, like accreditation, external boards, and managing the budget. All these activities are essentially management tasks related to running the daily operations of education. Pedagogical training will be seen more as an individual endeavor than as a collective responsibility, as each professor will be running their own courses, and there will be a need for training the most efficient teachers.

Educational leadership for the market-driven mode will involve more than the management of daily operations. There will be a need for networking with companies or other external stakeholders, facilitating faculty running student projects with companies, cross-course activities among academic staff, etc.

The same is the case for the integrated hybrid mode but with the very fundamental difference that visions and goals are focal points in terms of setting direction and motivating cross-disciplinary or cross-course activities. This is basically a leader who can facilitate bottom-up processes, recognize existing competencies, motivate collaboration among colleagues, reaching out to different communities and strategically create an overview of the curriculum. Faculty development will focus on both the individual courses and coherence in the curriculum and will aim to train a skilled and collaborative teacher.

There is therefore a need to develop educational leadership to create and sustain the required educational changes, combined with development of academic staff to apply more student-centered and innovative teaching and learning methods. There is also a need to establish both top-down and bottom-up strategies. This means that teachers should be actively involved in experimenting with their teaching and should make changes from the bottom of the organization while leaders support the changes from the top. Just practicing a top-down approach by telling academics what to do will typically not work; on the other hand, leaving staff to develop their teaching will result in a lack of coordination in the system. It is therefore advisable to implement strategies to coordinate and at the same time make room for experimentation.

An interesting review of educational leadership in higher education from 1985 to 2005 illustrates the important qualities for effective educational leaders. Even if the reporting is based on 20–35 years old data, these qualities are general competencies which will count no matter when and they add a personal dimension to the acknowledgment of university leaders, as shown in Table 8.2 (Bryman, 2007, 2013).

Table 8.2 Educational leadership competencies (Bryman, 2007, 2013)

The vision and directions are basics in the qualifications along with ability to influence, communicate and recognize employees’ efforts. The vision and direction together with the external recognition are embedded in the leadership role, and the same can partly be valid for influence and communication, which can be learned by using techniques. However, the personal qualifications as integrity and respect go beyond how leaders fulfill their role and these qualifications might be hard to learn in any course on leadership. Integrity and respect are to be earned in a culture. Often successful leaders, who are acting as change agents and initiating change, have tried several times to create change and they might have background experience with failing or creating partial successes.

Educational leadership also includes the promotion systems of universities. Internal promotion systems at universities focus predominantly on research evaluated by the number of journal articles, impact factors, and the amount of external funding. Teaching qualifications come second (Graham, 2015). In Scandinavian countries, academic staff development in university pedagogy is mandatory, and pedagogical qualifications are a prerequisite to obtain promotion. However, mandatory pedagogy training does not impact or change the fact that the promotion system is oriented toward research criteria. Different initiatives have emerged worldwide to apply a new framework for promotion that acknowledges teaching qualifications at various levels, ranging from being an active teacher to becoming a national and global leader of education.

Pedagogical training, voluntary as well as mandatory, the formulation and integration of a framework for the development of teacher qualifications, and the development of reward/award systems are some of the instruments employed for motivating academic staff to change; they are thus also important tools in educational leadership (Graham, 2018a). Training for academic staff development can be organized in many ways, including as compulsory and voluntary courses offered by institutions or national organizations.

In many countries, there has been both a shift in phrasing the related activities, ranging from academic staff development to educational development and a shift in the foci of the activities (Gibbs, 2013). However, no matter which concepts are used, training is an important part of educational transition as we teach as we have been taught, and there is a need for creating new experiences, such as student-centered learning and education for sustainable development (Barth & Rieckmann, 2012).

5 Educational Development

No matter which mode or modes institutions represent, there is an overarching trend toward digitalization and internationalization. International collaboration concerning curricula has been enhanced by the realized possibilities via digital and blended learning, as there is the possibility to establish cross-institutional courses or projects. In Europe, the EU facilitates the establishment of cross-national and institutional consortia, where the future of higher education is seen as a combination of elements from different universities. This can be developed in various modes but foremost as new digital educational courses across institutions. The logic is obvious: Why should each institution run their own courses, e.g., in thermodynamics, when the same learning objectives exist?

These trends, which regard the ‘universities as partners,’ will set a new scene for pedagogical training and teaching. The individual ‘ownership’ of courses might in the future be a much more cross-institutional matter than a national and institutional one. We are looking into the future landscape of engineering education, which will be very different from what we have known during the last 40 years, where change has taken place at the institutional or single course level. No matter which mode institutions compare themselves to, these changes will happen. In an academic mode, it will be within the academic disciplines, there will be cross-institutional collaboration, and in the market-driven mode, cross-national, cross-institutional, and cross-sector collaboration will be added. To the integrative mode, sustainability and a north/south collaboration will be emphasized.

Pedagogical training might be framed in new ways. The individual pedagogical dimension based on knowledge and development experiences from practice will still exist, but it will no longer be sufficient, as there is also an increasing need for collaboration across boundaries, such as cultures, languages, disciplines, systems, formats. Furthermore, a more student-centered learning approach will include new ways of teaching as lecturing will decrease along with an increase in facilitation and supervision skills.

Therefore, pedagogical training has to address these new formats and be exemplary in the way we are teaching students. The collaborative element, which characterizes many new learning innovations, ought to characterize the training in terms of collaboration within the disciplines, across the disciplines, and not least across institutions and national boundaries. Even the organizers of pedagogical development should team up and create learning communities which represent the teaching environments.

Change will include a change of cultural behavior if it involves cross-disciplinary teaching or cross-institutional development of new programs and courses. Furthermore, it will involve not only a change in teaching and learning practices but indeed in the organizational development of the universities. Stensaker (2018) makes the point that with organizational development at universities, academic development should be seen as cultural work, which will both develop and disrupt the organization and create new emerging practices and knowledge. Over the last 20 years, the balance between academic researchers and administration has reached a new distribution at the universities, and a third space has developed with the increase in administrative personnel. Therefore, the internal organizational tensions between different university actors not only concern tensions between disciplines but indeed also tensions between academics and administrative staff in a third space (Whitchurch, 2012). The combination of academics and administrative staff contributes to establishing new local cultures for teaching and learning, e.g., for areas such as career development or professional competencies, like communication with companies or teamwork skills. This has been a trend for the last two decades and creates tensions in the organization concerning research-based teaching along with the learning of professional competencies as an integrated part of the discipline or as an add-on, which the students have to relate to and integrate by themselves.

Academic development in both content and form is challenging and will have to meet new trends. It will operate in a landscape of internal tensions at the universities and the emerging internationalization of education, which adds to the complexity of the future development of engineering programs. Of course, it raises the question if academic development in the future will be a question of supporting strategic leadership more than supporting academic teachers? If academic development tips over to the side of management and administration, it might be even harder to motivate academics to drive or to participate in educational change processes. Thereby, there is a need for visible leadership to furnish the overall directions for competency development.

Educational development is a cultural process, as it concerns the teaching practices and students’ learning practices (Bali & Caines, 2018). Teachers are principally influenced by the way they have been taught. That is an embedded cultural behavior that we know how we learned, and we act accordingly even if this is not always with a level of awareness. Teaching together with a teacher from India will imply knowledge of the different systems; if the teaching involves lecturing, this might not be very different as regards the structure of the content, but in terms of facilitating students’ learning, it might be very different depending on the teaching and learning culture.

The development of teaching and learning cultures is a core element in educational development and facilitating the development of culture is part of leadership. Bali and Caines (2018) call for ownership, equity, and agency via connected learning in academic development, as dialogue and reflection on beliefs and values with others is a core element in transformative learning. This can be facilitated by professional learning communities (PLCs) consisting of a group of practitioners with the purpose of reflecting on and developing educational practices. PLCs will be most efficient when there are shared values and visions, collective responsibility, reflective professional inquiry, collaboration, and when collaborative as well as individual learning is promoted (Stoll et al., 2006). This type of organization can be cross-disciplinary, cross-institutional, or within single disciplines—all as long as there is a shared purpose and practice and that it can be facilitated by social media (Luo et al., 2020). There are other methods of creating collaborative educational cultures, such as peer tutoring and peer teaching, co-construction of curricula, interdisciplinary programs. (Falchikov, 2003).

Educational development can be regarded as transformative learning with a focus on how academic staff are understanding themselves as teachers and researchers, how they have learned, how they value learning, and how they practice in the classroom. An important part of learning is to critically reflect on the frame of reference, which consists of the basic values and beliefs of the practice and trying out alternatives (Mezirow & Taylor, 2009). As we initially stated in this chapter, beliefs and values might be very diverse, and the three university modes might be one way of capturing the variation. Academics are, by education, raised with the embedded logics within their disciplines, which also impact their identity and values. If an acoustic engineer enters a room, she or he will automatically look at the ceiling first just as a psychologist will be watching the people first of all. If you have knowledge of the application of sustainable materials, you will see them in buildings and the environment. Therefore, the educational change is complicated as it involves the values and identities among academics.

In the coming chapters, there are cases from the authors’ three universities. In the case from UTS, it is obvious how it started out with resistance and although slowly the studio thinking has merged into the curriculum as a natural part. This process has taken years, and part of this process is to build up academics’ trust in new learning systems. But no matter all the difficulties, resistance, and systemic barriers, it can be done in iterations like at UTS and Harvard or in founding new programs or institutions with new mindsets from the outset like in the Aalborg University case.