STREAMLINING ACADEMIC CHANGE PROCESSES THROUGH ENGINEERING PRINCIPLES

Adaptability, innovation, and efficiency are core engineering skills that students have to acquire to keep pace in a fast-changing world. It is, therefore, important that change processes in engineering education reflect and promote these skills. Further, as stated by, e.g., the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG, 2015) and the CDIO Standard 12 (2010), efficient assurance, enhancement, and evaluation of educational quality is vital. However, change and quality management within universities are often slow and unwieldy (Graham, 2012; Kamp, 2016). Despite being the manifesto of engineering education, systematic problem solving is rarely incorporated into program organization and development. We have applied the CDIO concept to create a new, sustainable line of communication between students and faculty, in the form of a short program-level student questionnaire where the results are used as input to further discussion. Key concepts in the design of our method have been a collaboration between students and faculty, iterative feedback loops, and simultaneous bottom-up and top-down work by student representatives and the program director, respectively. These approaches have minimized the risk of failure and delay as well as actively utilized the creative power of the student body. In the questionnaire, distributed four times per year, students can anonymously share any opinions about the program. The program director and a student representative work together to evaluate the responses, immediately forwarding feedback to the correct recipient. Students are informed about key outcomes to ensure a trustful relationship between them and the faculty and promote active participation. With our method, issues are detected and handled at an early stage, allowing the focus within the program to remain on education, innovation, and quality enhancement. In this work, we will detail our methodology for streamlining communication as characterized by the engineering methods taught at universities. We will demonstrate some results obtained so far in improving the time-efficiency of quality management, through active student representation and trustful faculty dialogue. Still being in the early stages of operation, we will also reflect on the future outlook of our strategy. Finally, we will discuss the benefits of utilizing the CDIO concept for implementing change processes in higher engineering education.