Two years ago, Hogeschool Gent became a full collaborator in the CDIO organisation. As a result of this, the CDIO philosophy, as expressed in its 12 standards, was adopted by the department of engineering studies INWE as “Departemental Educational Development Plan (DOOP)”. From the start, the INWE department opted for gradual introduction of the 12 standards, starting with design-build projects for all (>250) of its first year students.
The taskforce, responsible for this introduction has met with some specific difficulties: diverse student population, existing curriculum, and limited financial resources for designbuild projects. In this article, we will elaborate on the way we deal with these limitations, without losing the objective of introducing and improving engineering skills, according to the CDIO standards. We will inform about our initial projects, about the test we used to form the studentgroups and the effect of this group formation on the final result of the projects. To evaluate these projects and assess the students team performance, we used a mix of assessment methods: product evaluation, peer- and self-asssesment. Examples of the criteria used in these methods will be given, together with the pitfalls and the improvements we made this year.
These projects demand new ways of teaching and learning students and teachers are not always familiar with. We will inform about the comments made by the coaches of the student groups, the plus- and min-points formulated by the students and the modifications we did accordingly this year.
As a follow-up of these first year projects, the electronics course for second year students has been adapted to the methods of teaching and evaluating suggested by the CDIO standards. Initial results and observations made by students and coaches, will be presented and compared with methods and results from pre-CDIO years.
2nd International CDIO Conference, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden, 13 – 14 June 2006