CDIO recommendations have been borrowed from best practices applied in several renowned and mature engineering schools worldwide. Therefore, the implementation of CDIO in such universities may result in a natural and straightforward process. Nevertheless, most engineering faculties, particularly in Latin America, lack resources and experience in the consolidation of engineering education best practices, despite their quality and commitment to improving and innovating in their programs’ curricula. For these universities the implementation and consolidation of engineering education best practices still constitute a work in progress. Despite the remarkable efforts of the CDIO community at documenting the syllabus and recommended best practices for the realization of integrated engineering curricula, and the several papers contributed by universities reporting on their CDIO implementation experiences, to the best of our knowledge the initiative still lacks of a guide of CDIO implementation processes. These guides are highly required to help institutions answer frequent questions that arise at different stages of these processes. The Faculty of Engineering of Icesi University, Colombia, has been working for about two years on a curricular reform and the implementation of CDIO for two of our undergraduate professional programs: Telematics Engineering, and Computing Systems Engineering. In this paper we report on our experience and lessons learned during the redefinition of our curricula and implementation of CDIO, and describe the process that we have followed including success key factors, activities, roles, interactions among all actors, as well as supporting tools and forms. Our goal with this paper is to help other universities in the endeavor to continuously improve and innovate in their curricula by following the best practices recommended by CDIO. The implementation process that we have followed at Icesi University comprises four main phases. The first phase, which corresponds to the macro-curricular level, focuses on the definition of the professional competences and corresponding learning outcomes that our students will develop along the program. The main incomes of this phase are the surveys applied to the stakeholders, the institutional educational project of our university, and the syllabus of CDIO. The outcomes of this phase are the competences and learning objectives of the curriculum. The second phase, which corresponds to the meso-curricular level, concentrates on the definition of course blocks, with corresponding subjects and their relationships with the learning outcomes to be developed by the students. The result of this phase is a mapping between courses and the macro-curricular learning outcomes, including the levels of proficiency that must be achieved for each learning outcome at each course. The third phase, which corresponds to the micro-curricular level, focuses on the definition of learning objectives, teaching, and assessment strategies at the course level. The outcomes of this phase are the course syllabuses, which includes the learning and assessment strategies to be applied by the professors responsible of each course. Finally, the fourth phase, which corresponds to the curricular evaluation level, allows us to implement the assessment feedback loop from verification to the definition of strategies to ensure the continuous improvement and innovation of the curriculum.
Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014