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.

Pedagogical projects have often, at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, as well as elsewhere, been initiated and managed by individual enthusiasts rather than dedicated teams. This generally decreases the possibility of successful implementation of more ambitious ideas, e.g., changing educational programs, implementing the CDIO syllabus, or strengthening the pedagogical development of larger parts of the faculty. To enable wider and more effective change, KTH top management therefore launched a universityencompassing three-year project in 2014, in which a group of highly motivated teachers from all schools at KTH were appointed part-time pedagogical developers (PDs). The PDs were given the task of promoting pedagogical development and facilitate cooperation and knowledge exchange among faculty members, as described in two previous papers at CDIO conferences. From 2017, the outcomes of this project are supposed to be integrated parts of the KTH line organization. The project has led to numerous actions, which would have been difficult to set in motion unless given the freedom in time to explore and to develop into a collective effort rather than a myriad of individual “stand-alone” examples. By addressing key areas for pedagogical development, our group of dedicated faculty have tried to surpass the suboptimal "lock-in" of strict individual reasoning and to deal with surfaced questions and relevant issues in a broader collective manner. A major insight confirmed by the project and its many sub-projects has indeed been the fundamental importance of collegial discussions and the creation of processes that facilitate and support teacher cooperation. We have also, through discussions with faculty at KTH, confirmed the need for clearly defined, tangible incentives for teachers, motivating them to participate in pedagogical development activities, even if this means less time left for the traditional pathway to rewards within academia, i.e. research. In this paper, we chart changes that have occurred in the educational practices at KTH by describing and discussing the project’s focus on pedagogical development of faculty, actual execution of changes in the engineering educations, lessons learned along the way, and visions yet to be realised.

This paper presents a systematic, university--wide approach to creating an encompassing movement towards faculty development. In 2014, KTH Royal Institute of Technology launched the pedagogical developers initiative, appointing part--time pedagogical developers among teachers from all schools of KTH, to implement and strengthen good teaching and learning practices among faculty and students. They are teachers active in different educational programmes, with experience of, and interest in, pedagogical issues. In line with CDIO standard 10, the purpose of the pedagogical developers’ initiative is to facilitate cooperation and knowledge exchange between faculty members, and to establish communities of practice. The paper presents the activities, processes for developing these activities and preliminary results from the initiative’s second year, which focused much on supporting faculty development by putting into place a series of workshops, a format chosen for its combination of active community-building learning and time efficiency. The topics of the workshops emerged to meet faculty needs identified by the pedagogical developers during the first year. The workshops were created by smaller teams of pedagogical developers from different schools of KTH. This enabled a wide array of experiences and perspectives to be incorporated into the workshops. Main focuses of the workshops have been on creating internal discussions in dynamic communities of practice on specific subjects of interest, and on creating forums for exchange of ideas, open to the whole faculty. During Autumn 2015, the workshops have been offered as voluntary add-on parts of the basic course in teaching and learning offered to faculty at KTH. This first round of workshops generated a positive interest from teachers, and participant feedback indicates that they particularly appreciated the opportunity to work directly with their own courses and the opportunity to discuss pedagogical aspects with peers.