This workshop addresses the critical need for Curriculum Agility (CA) in contemporary engineering education, defined as the ability of a curriculum to be responsive and adaptable to rapid changes in society, industry, and student and university faculty needs by dynamically adjusting its structures, learning outcomes, and activities. Participants will explore the rationale behind CA, emphasizing its role in mitigating the Stakeholder Expectation Error that arises when educational programs fail to meet evolving stakeholder demands. The workshop delves into the concept of CA as a responsively organized education with dynamic learning content and flexible pedagogies, supported by the continuous development of staff. The ten principles of CA are discussed, which were formulated through extensive research and co-creation within the international engineering education community. The workshop also introduces the CA Self-Mapping Protocol, a facilitated, multi-level, cocreative process, designed to enable higher education institutions to assess and enhance their CA. This protocol, developed and refined through workshops and pilot studies at various European institutions, facilitates curriculum stakeholders to come to a shared understanding regarding the current state of CA and identify strategic actions for future improvement. Participants will gain insights into the protocol's key phases—Informing, Probing, Envisioning, Strategizing, and Prioritizing—and its emphasis on inclusive dialogue. The expected outcomes include a comprehensive understanding of CA, its guiding principles, and the value of the Self-Mapping Protocol as a tool for strategic curriculum innovation to ensure sustained quality and relevance of engineering programs.

Within six institutions, Chalmer’s University of Technology, Delft University of Technology, Eindhoven University of Technology, NTNU, Queen’s University Belfast, and Umeå University, activities of self-mapping Curriculum Agility have taken place, facilitated by the co-creators of this work. In this paper, they reflect on enablers of Curriculum Agility that they identified during the self-mapping process at their respective institutions. By putting a spotlight on enablers, ways to overcome obstacles are exemplified, when the ambition is to proactively futureproof an engineering curriculum. These enablers help in four curriculum innovation areas, which each have their own challenges: (1) Continuously adjusting learning content in courses, creating a need for a teaching and learning system with more dynamic learning goals and on-the-go, reciprocal expertise development. (2) Implementing or refining flexible education pedagogy and didactics to tailor to and being inclusive of the diverse student populations entering university. (3) Working with a responsive organisation and a continuously-change-facilitating management, where engagement and ownership of educational innovation is shared, and innovation space is constructively created where desired and needed. (4) Continuously developing all academic staff involved in engineering education innovation, for informed decision-making and shared understanding of the pedagogic and (inter- and trans-) disciplinary innovations needed to keep the engineering programme relevant and of high quality. This paper highlights positive examples of Curriculum Agility, and how its characteristics and principles can be implemented in a variety of university contexts with different organisational structures.

Future-proof engineering curricula can cope with fast-changing circumstances, and the opportunities and threats these bring along in the context of the curriculum. Curriculum Agility (CA) is a concept aimed at helping higher education institutions analyse how responsive their programmes are to changes in society, industry, and student characteristics and needs. The CA model describes features needed to adapt curricular and organizational structures, learning content and outcomes, learning activities and pedagogies, staff development, and examination design in a timely and proactive manner. Based on the model, a CA Self-Mapping Protocol has been developed that aims to actively engage and simultaneously enable curriculum stakeholders in the self-mapping process. It was tested at five European universities and at different levels, i.e. university, department, and program level. Leading questions focused on the effects of the CA self-mapping process; and what that could mean for the set-up of the protocol. The aim of this paper is to present to what extent, and in which form, the self-mapping protocol, as a design-thinking, guided dialogue with multiple stakeholders, is valuable and feasible in different higher engineering education institutional contexts. All facilitators were able to adjust the protocol to local contexts. And although there were all kinds of differences (of use and process) between the institutes, what ‘stands firmly’ is the importance of the negotiating understanding of what CA is and what it means to the local context. The presence of the ten principles were instrumental to ‘guarantee’ that people were discussing and considering the themes that needed to be addressed.