This paper investigates the processes, outcomes, and impact of the Unite! OER Courses Project, a cross-university initiative aimed at promoting Open Educational Resources (OER) across nine European higher education institutions. Aligned with UNESCO’s OER recommendations and the Open Science movement, the project sought to enhance accessibility to high-quality educational materials and foster digital competencies among both educators and students. The research adopts a qualitative case study approach, leveraging project reports and feedback from partners. Through the development of a multilingual massive open online course (MOOC) and an international OER course, the project addressed several core goals, including support for Open Science competencies and the advancement of digital literacy across Europe. The MOOC, launched in May 2024, attracted over 1,400participants, exceeding initial targets and demonstrating the growing demand for accessible OER content. Furthermore, capacity-building workshops aimed at educators provided training on how to incorporate OER. Initial findings indicate that the project successfully developed and disseminated several OER materials, including a multilingual MOOC and additional resources translated into Turkish, Indonesian, andArabic. The project also fostered capacity-building among partner institutions, enabling broader engagement with OER practices. Participants in the MOOC and related activities have also reported a significant increase in their competencies regarding OER and Open Science. This study underscores the value of cross-institutional collaboration and the potential of OER to enhance radical creativity, educational accessibility, and innovation in higher education.

The concept of Curriculum Agility has been co-created in a series of sessions at CDIO meetings and conferences since 2018. Deliverables were a jointly generated definition, characteristics, a set of principles, and a self-mapping process on these principles. Using the Curriculum Agility concept offers guidance for CDIO programs and institutions in increasing the adaptability of their curricula based on the latest insights and developments in their discipline, continuously fulfilling the need of an ever more diverse student population and anticipating sudden societal changes. Curriculum Agility takes a holistic approach to considering conditions for proactive and timely curriculum development, including but not limited to enhancement of faculty competence. Although the success of CDIO implementation depends on this wider set of conditions that can drive, enable, or hinder change, this is currently not addressed in the CDIO standards. This paper proposes Curriculum Agility as an optional standard in the CDIO framework. It is a widely applicable, program-level concept including both educational and organisational aspects that addresses an important need in engineering education, and it is co-created within the CDIO community. Curriculum Agility is currently not sufficiently present or addressed in the existing standards. Therefore, this paper argues that Curriculum Agility as an optional standard and rubric will be a new useful tool in the CDIO toolbox.

This special session, within the conference theme of Incorporating Convergence into Programs, Curricula, and Continuing Education, focuses on Curriculum Agility in engineering education. It will introduce the concept of Curriculum Agility and its current trends, as well as further co-develop the concept behind it. This is done following an iterative design thinking approach, by co-creating guiding principles that engineering institutions can use to make their study programs more responsive, dynamic, and flexible. Curriculum Agility is particularly important in engineering education in order to keep pace with the rapid development of new technologies and materials. In addition, the concept aims to meet students' expectations and needs for more individualized study plans, as well as society's need for forward-thinking engineers equipped to contribute to finding solutions to current and future societal challenges. Thus, to anticipate and meet these challenges, institutions for engineering education need to have an organizational and management structure with the capacity to act within a much shorter timeframe than traditionally seen in universities. Curriculum Agility is a framework for introducing necessary changes in operations to be able to act responsibly and rapidly on change and expectations. This work presents seven principles for Curriculum Agility that have emerged from a series of sessions at international conferences and network meetings. The seven principles currently include: Stakeholder Involvement, Organization and Governance, Decision Making, Program and Course Design, Innovation of Education, and Pedagogy and Didactics. This special session brings educators together to discuss the 'what, how and why' with regard to Curriculum Agility. The overall aim is to further develop a shared vision on Curriculum Agility and build upon the intention of assessing it at different levels in the organization of engineering education institutions. The expected outcome of the special session is a collection of refined, redefined, and perhaps even newly defined principles for Curriculum Agility.

Change and individualization are two aspects that are important in innovative higher education. In this paper, we argue for how the concept of curriculum agility can be used as a framework for engineering education that is able to meet societal, environmental, and technological challenges. In order to both anticipate and meet the needs of the rapidly changing world, engineering education needs to have an organization that allows for innovation, change and adaptation, with the capacity to respond within a (much) shorter timeframe than traditionally seen in higher education. The structure and processes of such organizations should include the time needed to establish and decommission new educational programmes, and the flexibility within the programmes. The CDIO’s Curriculum Agility Working Group has defined seven principles for curriculum agility and has analysed how these relate to the CDIOStandards. This paper describes how the principles can provide guidance on both a curricular and institutional level. The principles are mapped against the CDIO Standards, relating to what is required for an agile curriculum, in order to indicate how the Standards can be utilized to assess the flexibility and agility of educational programmes.

This innovative practice work in progress paper describes a recently launched university-wide initiative to strengthen global competence education at Sweden’s largest technical university, KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Current engineering education is expected to equip graduates with the skills needed to work effectively and ethically in environments characterized by social and cultural diversity. While this is commonly agreed on, adjusting program curricula to meet this need has proven to be a challenging task. To address this issue in a pragmatic way, KTH decided in 2016 to introduce an extra-curricular Certificate of Global Competence as a non-intrusive way of complementing existing programs. The certificate is made up of two courses and an international experience. This initiative has been designed to not only help students develop global competence but also to encourage and ensure quality in international mobility. As the certificate courses are elective for all programs at the university, students are presented with an opportunity to work closely together with people from different programs and backgrounds. This fosters cross-disciplinary understanding and encourages international-ization at home. The novelty of the certificate—nothing like it existed at any Swedish university—created uncertainty at the top management level. Even though one of the advantages of the certificate was the fact that it would strengthen the university’s global competence education while leaving existing programs untouched, the validation process took more than two years. However, the final result was that this bottom-up initiative is now endorsed by top management and part of the university’s internationalization endeavors. This paper presents the process of introducing the certificate as well as initial findings from the first courses, plans to extend the global competence initiative to faculty members and make the certificate an integral part of the university’s overall internationalization agenda.