Cross institutional comparison of curricular change in Dutch engineering bachelor programmes

The three Universities of technology of Twente (UT), Eindhoven (TU/e) and Delft (TUD) in the Netherlands each initiated major bachelor programme innovations between 2011 and 2014. The need for shorter study duration, higher pass rates, and lower dropout rates were reasons to instigate these innovations. In addition, at leasttwo of the technical Universities were losing market share. Finally, the programs were not yet adequately geared towards the big challenges of the future and the engineering skills the students needed for this. This contribution reports on a research project conducted by the 3TU Centre for Engineering Education (CEE). One of the aims of the researchis to findeffective components. The results reported in this project focus at the Intended curriculum (Van den Akker, 2003), the leadership and (organization) process used to implement the bachelor curriculum innovation and the drivers of change leading the institution into a major change process (Graham, 2014). The leading research questionin this research is ?In what way did the three technical universities realise the bachelor curriculum innovation objectives. Drivers of change, the innovation process and characteristics of the intended curriculum were special areas of interest. Results suggestthat the drivers for change have implications for the extent to which staff and students are involved in the change process and /or to what extent the studentneeds as a client are leading in determining the nature of the change. Furthermore, the characteristics of the change process are a set of heuristic moves to come to the desired results. In this paper we will share the process and its? impact on the objectives on the basis of the criteria for sustainable change by Ruth Graham. Finally, we will show that some of the elements of the intended curriculumcontradict between the 3 Universities, whilst theyhad the same goal in mind. The practical relevance is scaling mutual problems and professionalization through diverse approaches and input of the 3TU Federationtacit knowledge. Naturally, there are many implications of this study we will discuss during the presentation.