Interoperability In Education Program Courses - Challenges With Incremental And Radical Curriculum Changes

Due to various influences of a dynamic context of universities and society there are many changes that are required in education and many goals to relate to. For example: new pedagogical knowledge, didactics and technology for learning, tougher requirements for throughput, new rules for examination and goals, new societal demands for equality and sustainability, requirements for goal related grading. Together this has resulted in that it is increasingly complex to make changes, develop, design, improve and validate education programs. If education programs are likened to systems, and the task of changing them likened with engineering tasks, then tools and models in systems engineering could be applied to support development also of education programs. The purpose of this paper is to investigate systems engineering processes and models to support development for education programs. The method for investigation has been to relate and reflect our own experiences to the framework from systems theories and systems engineering and where applicable apply this to education programs and the challenges encountered in a highly dynamic context in universities and in society. The methodology in this paper is based on practice of the authors. The authors are both researcher and teacher at KTH as well as assigned roles which requires program development. In this paper we continue to follow the development and implementation of education programs presented at INTED2017. To increase system thinking and system views is something we require in our engineering education, in accordance to CDIO. That this is not a common language in our own work and development is a weakness. This initial paper will help communicating the need for this and also present ways of working with our peers and students. In the end extended work on this will support developers in academia to support the transformation of resources, the organization of skill and technologies that enables delivery of education as well as the organization of people to make the education program function, or work, as intended.