Work in Progress: Cobbler, Stick to Your Last! On Providing Engineers Constructive Alignment

Constructive Alignment (CA) has become a well-established concept of Instructional Design in Higher Education. Even in Higher Engineering Education, teachers have begun adopting CA into their teaching. However, this is neither widespread as of yet nor done in a systematic manner. This holds especially true for laboratories as well as (partly-) digital ones. Many digital laboratories originated during the pandemic due to the pressure to change teaching almost immediately. These changes range from replacing practical laboratory work with videos of the work being done to conceptual and instructional redesigns of entire laboratories. With the oncoming trend of digital laboratories as well as of teaching, learning and industry 4.0, it is more important than ever to enable engineers to implement sound instructional frameworks such as CA of different types of laboratories when designing these emerging courses. This work in progress shows the current status of our efforts to create shorter and readily accessible materials and checklists concerning laboratory types and aligning intended learning outcomes, teaching and learning activities and assessment tasks to be used to create or redesign laboratories in engineering education. The contribution ends with a discussion on the effect hoped for as well as comments on future work.