CDIO programs foster active learning and project based courses, which are key for the learning of disciplinary knowledge, design skills and also provide opportunities to improve students’ personal and inter-personal skills in an information rich environment. Workspaces that can support this type of hands-on learning are fundamental, and one of the twelve CDIO standards therefore recommends that participating institutions provide workspaces that are studentcentered, user-friendly, accessible, and interactive. Workspaces have been developed in many universities worldwide and particularly within institutions collaborating within the CDIO initiative. This paper focuses first on a brief description and comparison of three innovative Multimodal Learning Environments (MLE) in North America, implemented at institutions that are collaborating within the CDIO initiative. These initiatives are the Integrated Teaching and Learning Laboratory (ITLL) at University of Colorado in Boulder (USA), the Aeronautics and Astronautics Learning Laboratory for Complex Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge (USA) and the Integrated Learning Centre (ILC) at Queen’s University in Kingston (Canada). The objective of this comparative study is to provide guidelines to the CDIO community for the implementation of such facilities and to bring forward some of the lessons learned generated by these past endeavors. A selected number of quantifiable parameters are proposed and applied to a MLE currently under development at École Polytechnique Montreal. The paper hence proposes a framework, which aims to help future workspaces development by identifying the key characteristics related to the design, implementation and operation of CDIO student multimodal workspaces.
