The ALE mission is ‘to bring active learning back into engineering education’. The ALE co-operation is based on workshops for persons dedicated to better teaching from institutions ready to implement new teaching methods and collaboration of workshop participants between the workshops.

The initiative to the co-operation was taken in 1999 by the Ecole des Mines de Nantes, France and Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota´, Colombia, under the name ‘Innovation in Engineering Education’. In the spring of 2000 a steering committee for the co-operation was formed with members from the two initiating institutions and six other universities from Europe and South America. Since then some committee members have been replaced, so now North America, Africa and Asia are also represented.

The first ALE workshop took place at Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela in January/February 2001. A total of 47 participants representing 21 universities in two South American, two North American and seven European countries joined to share experiences and plan for future collaboration. The second ALE workshop in June 2002 was co-hosted by the Technical University of Denmark and Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. The workshop took place partly in Copenhagen and partly in Gothenburg and had 30 participants from 16 universities in Europe, USA, Colombia and China. In June 2003 the third ALE workshop was hosted at the brand new Olin Engineering College near Boston in the USA.

In 2015 a pilot experience was done, where three conferences (ALE, PAEE and IRSPBL) were joined in the same event (International Joint Conference on the Learner in Engineering Education (IJCLEE 2015)).

From 2016 ALE and PAEE have been organized to enhance Active Learning, Problem and Project-Based Learning in Engineering Education. The conference is now the merging of two events: the International Symposium on Project Approaches in Engineering Education (PAEE) organized by the PAEE association, and Active Learning in Engineering Education Workshop (ALE) organized by Active Learning in Engineering Education Network. From 2020 the event has been organized under the name “International Conference on Active Learning in Engineering Education”.