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Intercultural, multilingual and culturally and academically diverse classrooms are a common reality in current higher education (HE) landscapes, as globalisation is effectively taking place in all major schools. Rethinking instructional design strategies that contribute to the overcoming of communication and cultural differences in both online and blended learning processes may help not only improve the development of more efficient online learning environments but also meet the challenges of current teaching and learning processes. Special focus will be put into engineering education through the medium of English and the training of engineering lecturers in HE through communities of practice (CoPs), which present, integrate and discuss how to integrate content and language (through what is known as the content and language integrated learning (CLIL) approach) as well as trends, challenges and opportunities related to recent technological developments on students’ learning ourcomes. The desciption of the pedagogical training shared through a CoP describes E-strategies to improve instructional design in engineering courses in online learning environments when English is used as a medium of instruction and integrated with content in a CLIL approach.

Continuous technological advances keep challenging current and future engineers to anticipate and adapt to the new trends and paradigms that are expected to take place in a near future. One of such paradigms is the Industry 4.0 that encompasses the promise of a new industrial revolution based on the interconnectivity of people and systems to communicate, analyse and use information related to industrial processes. New challenges, as well as new opportunities, will rise in this digital landscape, demanding from future engineers the ability to adapt and grow in such ground-breaking environments. With such dynamic changes taking place in the current and future industries, engineering education has to adapt and prepare future graduates to work and function in these demanding environments. The set of skills envisaged to be held by future engineers is the ability to work and collaborate using digital means of participation as well as the ability to effectively use intercultural communicative skills. To this end, an exploratory study was conducted among different European Higher Education Engineering Schools to integrate a project with common aims and goals, resulting in various collaborative engineering activities that were designed to be carried out by undergraduate industrial and mechanical engineering students to further improve their learning outcomes and to acquire, or improve on, dedicated intercultural, communicative and colaborative skills. Following both quantitative and qualitative approaches, this study combined different types of data and methods of analysis in order to provide an exploratory account of the envisaged findings.