Creating the CDIO Initiative
The first task in designing our new educational program was compiling a list of the abilities needed by engineers. To do this, we formed focus groups of industry representatives, engineering faculty and other academics, university review committees, and alumni. We asked them, “What are the knowledge, skills and attitudes that the graduating engineer should possess?” We charted the responses. (Download a 32K .pdf sample survey and 3K .pdf survey data summary.)

We blended the focus group results with industry and educators’ wish lists and created the first draft of a new syllabus. When you look at the CDIO Syllabus you'll see that the top levels of our outline match our definition of the Essential Functions of an Engineer:

As we broke down each of these syllabus levels into sublevels, we needed to decide just how proficient we want students to become in each area. We asked our focus groups to help us with that. It was interesting to note that despite the diversity of those surveyed, everyone’s prioritizing of proficiencies was startlingly similar.

Then, how did you construct your curriculum? Next>