Engineering education is based on articulated goals and student learning outcomes developed through curriculum programs. The first task of turning the CDIO vision into a curriculum program is to develop an understanding of abilities needed by contemporary engineers. Such abilities are discovered from stakeholders who formalize the knowledge, skills, and attitudes expected from engineering graduates. Engineering education has four key stakeholder groups: students, industry, university faculty, and society. The vision of engineers the society needs varies between groups of stakeholders. For instance, industry and university faculty may disagree about the levels of proficiency the engineers may achieve regarding a particular CDIO syllabus topic, e.g. Knowledge of marketing principles. This paper presents an approach to generate unified syllabuses departing from surveys conducted to several stakeholder groups. The approach considers, for every CDIO syllabus topic, a specific proficiency level and an impact factor. The proficiency level is a specific value assigned by each stakeholder to each topic. The impact factor is a value that is associated to each stakeholder group according to his experience and proficiency level on a particular topic. The approach has a direct application for practical curricula committees and is supported by an open source tool.
Proceedings of the 9th International CDIO Conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 9 – 13, 2013.