As a framework for re-designing engineering curriculum, CDIO has been adopted by many educational institutions worldwide. What sets it apart from other engineering educational frameworks is the comprehensiveness of its approach, encapsulated in the 12 CDIO Standards. Two standards relevant to professional development of engineering educators, are Standard 9 "Enhancement of Faculty Competence” and Standard 10 "Enhancement of Faculty Teaching Competence."
This paper focuses mainly on Standard 10, which refers to "actions that enhance lecturer competence in providing integrated learning experiences, in using active experiential learning methods, and in assessing student learning", as opposed to Standard 9 which covers "actions that enhance lecturer competence in personal and interpersonal skills, and product, process, and system building skills." Our focus on Standard 10 aims on maintaining a lecturer's CDIO Competency via training to become an Academic Mentor, specifically in the Diploma in Chemical Engineering (DCHE) in Singapore Polytechnic (SP).
The paper first provides a short background literature review of the changing role of engineering educators, in light of changing student characteristics in today's globalized, inter-connected world. The paper then presents the desired characteristics of an engineering educator and highlights the lack of emphasis given to such training; and calls for a more professional approach to preparing them, noting in particular the importance of mentoring. More specifically, this part of the paper argued that engineering educator must be skilled in pedagogical content knowledge, and not just subject matter knowledge and general pedagogical knowledge.
The paper then briefly explains SP’s Academic Mentor Scheme and its broad objectives, outlining how we utilize the scheme to enhance our own CDIO capability, with specific objectives for DCHE Academic Mentor. We share the same framework from our initial efforts in building CDIO capability that was presented in earlier CDIO conference, which suggests that alignment should be attained between curriculum, pedagogy and competency. This framework is adequate for our earlier effort, which focused on helping newly-hired lecturers, making the transition from industry to academia, to quickly get up to speed in curriculum design using relevant CDIO Standards. However, for the development of academic mentor, this needs to be supported by additional framework, if we are to achieve the expressed objectives for our academic mentor. Specifically, we identify a model of continual improvement for academic mentor that emphasizes educational research to inform practice that supports the professional development of the academic mentor. This, in turn, enables the academic mentor to support other teaching faculty involved in CDIO implementation.
Lastly, the paper shares positive experiences from both mentor (the first author) and mentee (the second author) that has resulted from this partnership. We present a summary on how this partnership evolved, followed by key issues and challenges faced by both parties. These include matching of expectations between mentor and mentee and adopting of new pedagogic approaches (e.g., flipped learning and peer instruction, development of learning tasks based on dynamic simulation). We conclude by summarizing some key learning points that may be of interest to others involved in similar professional development activity.
Proceedings of the 11th International CDIO Conference, Chengdu, China, June 8-11 2015