Modern engineers are engaged in all phases of the lifecycle of products, processes and systems to serve the need of the society. It is the responsibility of the engineering education to prepare graduates with the competence needed for their professional practice, and the CDIO framework is a methodology for systematically developing engineering programs accordingly.
This paper describes the activities of a consortium of universities in the Raw Materials area, providing programmes and courses across the entire value chain from mining and mineral processing to materials design, sustainability and recycling. In Europe, the existing MSc programmes linked to Raw Material often focus on applying technical theory to typical problems. The achieved level of understanding is often insufficient, so when students graduate as professionals they know how to solve pre-defined technical problems, but they often struggle with applying their understanding to unseen problems. Students in such programmes seldom practice entrepreneurial, communication and innovation skills at a level that is needed by society and employers. To address these issues, we apply the CDIO framework to modernize the education by integrating such competences into the programmes and courses. By implementing CDIO, students will encounter more real-world problems which are cross disciplinary, include societal and business aspects and are characterized by complex, ill‐defined problems for which one needs to find and evaluate one or many solutions.
It is widely discussed in the CDIO community that one of the main constraints in implementing CDIO is faculty development. CDIO standards 9 and 10 focus on the faculty development and competencies, both in terms of the necessary educational competence to implement the desirable change in programs and courses, and in terms of faculty’s own product, process, and system building skills. In order to implement CDIO into the raw materials programmes in Europe, a three module approach is made, as illustrated below: Module 1: Train and create awareness of the CDIO Initiative, and how to implement CDIO in programme and course development. Module 2: Demonstrate examples and case studies from the pilot universities to give ideas and inspiration for implementing CDIO both at programme level and course level. Module 3: Developing CDIO based projects for the specific programmes and courses related to the field of raw materials including mining and metallurgy aspects with industrial involvement.
This paper describes the development of a faculty training course covering module 1 and 2 above. It provides a perspective on the implementation of CDIO into programmes related to raw materials, capturing the various models of implementation in the partner universities’ programmes and courses. This paper will act as a reference for developing CDIO based project courses in specific disciplines, as illustrated here in the field of raw materials. Keywords: CDIO Standards 9, 10; Raw Materials; Curriculum Development
Proceedings of the 13th International CDIO Conference in Calgary, Canada, June 18-22 2017