After three years of the CDIO deployment in the Faculty of Civil Engineering at Duy Tan University, a certain number of improvements have been accomplished, namely in the students’ creativity, flexibility and adaptability under various learning or working conditions. Most students are now more proactive and progressive in their learning skills and approach despite of the fact that Civil Engineering is always a very demanding discipline. A recent survey, however, showed that while improvements are prevalent, the rates of improvement were not as fast as expected, especially, when compared with those of students in Western countries from previous case studies. Further analysis has demonstrated a number of geo-social reasons for this reality: First of all, cultural barriers continue to be a major obstacle for open discussion and independent demonstration of new ideas amongs the students. Due to the Asian cultural values, many students are still passive in their self expression in class unless given the opportunity, or even permission, to do the otherwise. Secondly, even though there is additional coursework for soft-skill development, the new soft skills developed do not appear to be as beneficial as expected. The main reason has to do with the fact that most of our soft-skill courses are quite general like Public Speaking skills, Office Writing skills, Critical Thinking skills, etc. They were not designed specifically for students in the field of Civil Engineering. This dilemma is probably the same for the soft-skill development of students in other technology and engineering disciplines at Duy Tan University as well. Thirdly, by focusing on the traditional Career Planning approach, entrepreneurship skills are usually ignored or not emphasized enough. This is actually a major weakness of Vietnamese (and Asian) students when compared with Western students, and more than often, this hinders our students from thinking big. Last but not least, while new technologies in Civil Engineering (as well as in other engineering tracks) are rapidly made and introduced in schools, not all of them are quickly adopted by businesses in the industry in Vietnam. This creates a certain gap for our students in their approach when they come to work with real-world businesses. Understanding these geo-social realities is only the first step in our continuous improvement of the CDIO model, and yet, we do believe that these will be of great interest to universities and colleges in Asia, which are looking for ways to overcome traditional cultural barriers. A series of solutions from our perspective are also proposed in this paper accordingly.
Proceedings of the 11th International CDIO Conference, Chengdu, China, June 8-11 2015