Course design approaches for the EHEA: Scaling up from pilots

After years of preparation and limited-scale pilot projects, full blown implementation of European Higher Education Area (EHEA) compliant degrees started in 2008 at the UC3M. This paper discusses the final stages of preparation, as well as the initial lessons from this go-live experience, focusing on a core (compulsory) second year subject of the computer engineering curriculum whose full-scale implementation started in 2009. Lessons drawn from the preparatory pilots are presented, implementation challenges are identified and analyzed, and both school-level and course-level required design approaches are discussed. Conclusions highlight that successful adoption of some critical elements of the EHEA methodology in the Spanish engineering education environment is far from certain.