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This study explored engineering educators' perspectives on their professional learning in a pedagogical development programme with the ultimate goal of achieving educational change in African countries through the adoption of PBL methodology. This study was based on a three-year-long programme organised by a Danish university through an Erasmus programme with the participation of diverse institutions across Africa. Q methodology was adopted with 40 participants to explore both individual and collective subjective views of supporting factors for professional learning. Q-factor analysis resulted in three prevailing group-based opinions, which respectively emphasised: 1) improvement of teaching competence and student benefits in terms of employability; 2) personal benefits in terms of job opportunities; and 3) institutional support leading to confidence in PBL implementation. The results suggest that individual awareness and effort, as well as institutional support, is essential for the facilitation of educators' learning as an outcome of pedagogical development. It is concluded that pedagogical development efforts should consider the complexity of engineering educators' professional learning process and that this has implications for the future organisation of professional learning programmes in general and the format of cross-institutional collaboration in particular.

The pedagogical development (PD) for educators in higher engineering education is indispensable to the promotion of educational changes and high-quality teaching and learning necessary to train twenty-first century engineering talents. With the expansion of various PD activities in engineering education in recent decades, there is a growing need to understand the characteristics and impact of current PD activities and to develop strategies for their further development. This study reviews 116 articles to provide an overview of current PD activity designs and the challenges reported in research on engineering education. The selected papers' frameworks, duration and organizational formats, evaluation methods, teachers' learning outcomes, research methods, and reported challenges are summarized. The findings of this study call for additional research on theory-driven designs for future PD activities as well as additional empirical PD studies using multiple data sources, a variety of research methods, and various analytical tools.