A handbook of program design practices.

The digital transformation affects Higher Education systems on multiple levels and allows the creation of innovative study programs. The master degree course Intellectual Encounters of the Islamicate World (IEIW) at Freie Universität Berlin (2012 – 2019) provides a complex case study for the challenges that instructional designers, program administrators, instructors and students face in a blended-learning degree program. This handbook outlines strategies and insights for the design, implementation and continuous evaluation of an academic format geared to skill-training in transdisciplinary research and intercultural dialogue. It describes a perspective for project management and program development that combines agile frameworks with a fragile multi-stakeholder environment, with the goal of creating dynamic workflows that adapt to evolving requirements, needs and opportunities.