A heuristic to understand curriculum change: towards comparing 3 course programme overhauls within the Dutch 3TU coalition

The 3TU coalition consists of the three universities of technology in the Netherlands: Delft, Eindhoven and Twente, which are all all-round engineering universities. The universities decided to strengthen engineering research and education in the Netherlands by collaborating and learning from each other in the Centre for Engineering Education (CEE). In the CEE, the three universities work on joint research and development projects with a special focus on studying and enhancing engineering education in a structured way. The project reported in this paper is set up within the framework of the 3TU CEE and pertains to curriculum change in the three participating technical universities. . In recent years the three universities overhauled their bachelor programmes to improve the learning experiences of the students and, ultimately, improve graduation rates and diminish time to graduation. Such curriculum changes are usually not documented in such a way that the process and outcomes can be easily understood and that limits the capacity of an organisation to learn from them. In this CEE research project, the overhaul processes are mapped, evaluated and compared ex post facto. The goal of this effort is to collect and share experiences and ideas on course programme development and implementation and to isolate effective practices. To achieve this, an ontology of factors influencing a curriculum change process needed to be developed, to allow comparison across the research sites. This ontology was designed to help map and evaluate effective practices for design and implementation of changes in course programmes, but also to help understand what interventions are effective in terms of improving student success. The special focus in this project is the uniqueness of developing engineering course programmes. Engineering is an interdisciplinary field where scientific knowledge is applied knowledge to design solutions to solve complex problems in an engineering kind of way (see e.g. Godfrey Parker, 2010; Graham, 2012). This creates many challenges for those who design course programmes, but also forthose who implement such a programme. In this paper we describe the elements of the ontology and the scientific basis for inclusion. We also describe how the ontology fits in with the research methodology of the project.