The Pedagogical Developers Initiative – Sustainable Impact of Falling into Oblivion?

Between 2014-16, KTH Royal Institute of Technology set aside considerable resources in its biggest pedagogical project to date, the Pedagogical Developers Initiative. The project has been continuously reported on at recent CDIO conferences. While aimed primarily at CDIO Standard 10, enhancement of faculty teaching competence, the project managed, by design as much as through accident, to strengthen many CDIO standards and syllabus items. With the conclusion of the project, the constructive practices and ideas that emerged from the initiative were meant to be incorporated into the regular operations of the university, a task that was delegated to each of KTH’s ten schools. However, even though KTH officially labelled the project a success, the schools have taken a non-uniform approach to this endeavour, as they indeed had done to the project as a whole during its duration. Following up on our earlier reports, and primarily using data from interviews and our own observations, the paper looks at which of the initiative’s ideas and practices have survived the end of the project, in what forms, by what means, and what insights and lessons one can draw from this when designing mechanisms for continuous and sustainable improvement of pedagogical practices at a technical university.
QC 20181008