The School of Engineering in Jönköping offers four master programs with in total about 100 students, relatively evenly distributed among those four programs. The school has made a thorough revision of all its programs, largely to improve the influence by the principles of CDIO with a start of the new curricula at fall semester 2013. For the master programs this meant that a new joint introductory course for all master students should be set in operation. The aim with this paper is to present the basic rationale behind the course, how it was set in operation and the students’ and teachers’ experiences of the first trial as well as planned modifications for next year’s course. The profile of the research at the school is to advance the knowledge concerning the product realization process in small- and medium sized manufacturing companies and the different master programs support this profile. It was thus decided that the introductory course should demonstrate the same profile by a project performed by the students. Moreover, the course should support the development of a community of master students that know each other regardless of the master program they are following in order to enlarge the opportunities for networking and bringing different experiences together. The course should be appropriate as an introduction course for the four master programs, specializing in industrial design, product development, information engineering or production systems. The course should thus provide understanding also for other stages in the product realization process that are related to but not included in the own education, both regarding the process, the leadership and the research methods used. The design of the course was done by the program managers together with the examining teacher in group dynamics and leadership, thereby involving five teachers. The course examination volume is 9 credits (out of 120 for a whole master program), divided into three parts, the content of the product realization process (3 credits), the group dynamics and leadership development (3 credits) and the research and inquiry methodology knowledge (3 credits). The course was structured and taught by lectures, exercises, seminars and project work. Projects groups were formed including at least one student from each program. The examinations were done by a poster and model exhibition regarding the content of the product realization process, an individual reflective assignment regarding the leadership and group development process during the project and an individual written exam regarding the research and inquiry methodology part. The course is just finished, the exhibition has been held and the teacher group is correcting and grading the exam and the assignments. A plenary oral evaluation has been held where the students confirmed that some goals were reached and some were not. Moreover, the examination results of the course is not fully known yet but will be reported in the paper. The experiences among the teacher group are multifaceted but largely positive and next year’s course is looked forward to.
Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014