Engineering education and real-world demands on engineers have in recent years drifted apart. Realizing that this widening gap must be closed, leading engineering schools in the USA, Europe, Canada, UK, Africa, Asia, and New Zealand formed the CDIO Initiative: A worldwide collaborative to conceive and develop a new vision of engineering education.
CDIO is based on a commonly shared premise that engineering graduates should be able to: Conceive – Design — Implement — Operate complex value-added engineering systems in a modern team-based engineering environment to create systems and products.
The main characteristics of a CDIO-based education:
An education that stresses the fundamentals, set in the context of Conceiving – Designing – Implementing – Operating systems and products:
- A curriculum organised around mutually supporting courses, but with CDIO activities highly interwoven
- Rich with student design-build-test projects
- Integrating learning of professional skills such as teamwork and communication
- Featuring active and experiential learning
- Constantly improved through quality assurance process with higher aims than accreditation