In a lifelong learning society students need to deal with the responsibility to give their learning path direction, find motivation, and prove what they have learned. What pedagogics and what kind of didactic structure do you need to bring this about in higher education? What does it mean for the professionality of the teaching staff, the organization of the teams, and the needed facilities? A co-creational approach is applied in redesigning the curriculum of the undergraduate programme Industrial Design Engineering [Open] Innovator, which offers multidisciplinary projects in authentic learning environments, and caters for the professional profiling needs of our future students. Teaching staff, students, alumni, future students, industry (including the social profit sector), and educational scientists collaborate towards the flexible, integrated and choice-based 'Project M(odular) Curriculum'. This paper describes the arguments for the choices made from an educational point of view, taking the twelve CDIO standards and CDIO syllabus as a blue print. In certain standards, project M goes beyond the framework to fulfil the needs of stakeholders, take the newest useful (engineering) educational research outcomes into account, and come to a curriculum design that will be adaptable and versatile enough to hold value for the coming ten years at least.
Based on the experiences of Project M, considerations on refining CDIO standards 5, 8, 11 and 12 are presented in the discussion, together with a rationale to add a rubric score to the CDIO self-evaluation, and the discussion of minor gaps in the CDIO syllabus.

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