Curriculum co-design using participatory rapid prototyping tools

Higher education is experienced by many academics as a highly individualized environment where they work in relative isolation and often do not see how their teaching fits together with other courses and into the wider curriculum. But, when the ultimate goal of that curriculum is the development of something as complex as engineering expertise, this requires collaboration between teachers across a programme. Rapid prototyping is a design approach which is used in numerous engineering domains as well as in engineering education. The goal here was to use participatory rapid prototyping tools to involve a range of stakeholders in conceptualizing a curriculum for the teaching of open-ended problem solving and design skills across engineering programmes. The intention was not to prototype the curriculum itself, but rather to use the prototyping process as a means of facilitating collaboration and engagement from across stakeholders. The process undertaken is potentially scalable to other engineering schools and programmes.