Involving students in engineering course design: a combined approach based on constructive alignment and multi-criteria decision-making

Empowering students to actively shape their learning is essential. Various student involvement models, such as design-based research, participatory design, and co-creation, emphasise students’ growing role in shaping educational activities. Engaging students in course design, as seen in student co-creation, can enhance agency, improve the student experience, and boost outcomes. Considering this, we propose a systematic approach combining multi-criteria decision-making with constructive alignment theory to involve students as co-creators in course design. This approach aims to engage students in the course design process and co-create intended learning outcomes, which can be regarded as the primary participatory phase in developing a co-created course. By involving students, our approach aims to gain insight into their needs, prioritise their views, and guide the formulation of appropriate course specifications throughout the course design process. The approach is applied to a new multi-disciplinary engineering course, and the results are summarised following its corresponding steps. Students’ feedback indicates that the approach positively influenced their motivation, engagement with course objectives, collaboration with teachers, and overall achievement of intended learning outcomes. This study’s significance lies in its contribution to higher education, offering a more integrated and systematic approach to support co-creation between educators and learners in academic course design.