TU Delft education system is transformed on three levels: 1) new courses and projects in existing B.Sc. and M.Sc. programs for multidisciplinary and reflective learning; 2) new M.Sc. programs focusing on multi and interdisciplinarity, personal development, and professional skills; and 3) central Interdisciplinary Projects for Master Students from different programs. With these steps, the university offers students a learning ecosystem where identity-building can occur, fosters interdisciplinary teamwork, and strong interaction with the professional world and government is necessary to finish projects. In this article, the ecosystem will be explained, and results will be shared of surveys among students who experienced learning in the learning ecosystem. The surveys show that students under stand their future role in the community as engineers, feel that they have acquired new skills, feel better about framing complex problems, and are more competent to work in the industry.@en

The increasing global demand for robotics expertise led the Delft University of Technology to launch a two-year Master of Science programme in Robotics in 2020. The programme was designed to educate versatile robotics engineers capable of overseeing the entire process from conception of robotics systems to implementation. The curriculum integrates disciplines such as machine perception, artificial intelligence, robot planning and control, human-robot interaction, and ethics, and emphasises personal development through a course called Portfolio, which was later rebranded as Vision and Reflection. The effectiveness of the programme was evaluated by conducting a survey among the first cohort of students. The online survey, completed by 21 alumni, assessed the programme’s alignment with graduates’ career paths and their perceptions of the programme. Most respondents (81%) secured employment, with 69% in robotics, and all others had consciously chosen different fields. On average, graduates found jobs in under a month. Common job titles were Robotics Engineer and Software Engineer. However, graduates least appreciated the original Robot & Society and Portfolio courses. The recently rebranded Vision and Reflection course is expected to improve student engagement by focusing on meaningful reflection rather than documentation. Overall, the programme received positive feedback, with 88% of respondents saying it provided a comprehensive robotics education, and 94% stating they would choose it again. However, the evaluation was limited to the more successful half of the cohort, indicating the need to assess the experiences of the remaining graduates, who took over 2.5 years to complete their degrees.
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University students are asked to become all-round human beings, knowing how to be engaged in Engineering in the future, as well as wholly socialised and going through personal development steps. However, how and where are the students supposed to acquire these skills? Do we already have them in the Higher Education programmes and curricula? This article explores low threshold steps that can be taken to tweak the curriculum and implicit professionalisation of staff towards incorporating transversal skills and reflective activities that allow students to develop to their full potential.. One is a roadmap Workshop identifying guiding principles and touchpoint activities for curricular change. The other is a survey on how transversal skills are currently thought to have been embedded in the curriculum.

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In this paper, we take the position that teaching engineering itself is a design science. Engineering educators worldwide creatively design, implement, and evaluate new ways of teaching to facilitate the learning of their students and to respond to various societal challenges. Sadly, their teaching and course design discoveries often remain with them. By representing successful experiences in engineering education as structured pedagogical patterns, we could develop this vital professional knowledge collectively into a so-called pattern language. The pattern language method acknowledges the complexity of instructional design and divides it into smaller and more understandable pieces. One piece is called a ‘pattern’. This paper aims to set the argument of why and how to develop a pedagogical pattern language for engaging and activating engineering education. In Delft, we see this pedagogical language as a part of TU Delft’s so-called ecosystem approach toward learning and teaching. TU Delft recognizes the need among students for impact-driven education that matches the way this generation learns and what our society needs. Successful ecosystem pedagogies will be the core of the intended pedagogical pattern language. It is our idea to develop this pattern language in close cooperation with the teaching communities of TU Delft, that is the TUD Teaching Academy, the 4TU Centre of Engineering Education, and CDIO.@en

In this paper we studied the student’s perception of the acquisition of professional capabilities in Challenge based learning environments with a strong reflective component. The results show students feel the relevance of personnel development from the very moment the enter their master studies. However, they only truly acquire all the relevant professional capabilities when working in interdisciplinary teams on real life problems in interaction with stakeholders.@en

In 2019, the authors came up with a vision of the future university for engineers. It describes a future situation and behaviour of ‘reflective engineers” who interact and behave in a particular way while engaging with technology. The vision is created with a Vision in Product Design (VIP) methodology from Hekkert & van Dijk. This vision of the future university starts with the idea that every one of us has personal ambitions, talents and interests that drives our interests and ways of working for the good of society at large. Nevertheless, at the start of our career, we may not be aware of these ambitions, talents and interests, and one needs to explore and reflect on a variety of challenges to discover: (1) In what way we would like to engage with technology (2) How would we like to work together in the technological domain (3) Whether we prefer to engage in slow/fast production cycles A reflective portfolio including engineering roles as a vehicle to become a deliberate professional will be embedded in the interdisciplinary master curriculum of biomedical engineering at the 3ME department at TU Delft. In this conceptual paper, we will expand on the design implementation process of the reflective engineer in challenge-based education following the vision of the future university.

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