About 50 interested researchers and teachers gathered at Chalmers on October 17 for the CDIO seminar "Towards agile, interdisciplinary and individualised engineering education" arranged by Prof. Johan Malmqvist, Chalmers.
Engineering education has traditionally been delivered in long, discipline-specific programmes such as mechanical, electrical or civil engineering. This setup has been successful for almost 200 years but is challenged in today’s situation where students need to be better prepared for addressing transdisciplinary problems in, for example, sustainable development, automation and sports technology. In addition, the fast pace of technology development requires frequent updates of educational content, not easy to combine with the 4-5 year change cycle of current engineering curricula. Furthermore, today’s students are expecting an education that enables a high degree of individualisation.
The seminar aimed to present and discuss novel agile, interdisciplinary and individualized curricular design approaches with particular relevance to CDIO education. How to ensure stakeholder engagement, how to establish and maintain a change culture and how operate these models for large student groups are among the topics to be focused.
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The seminar provided an opportunity to learn insights from some leading experts in the area and sharing knowledge and experiences with other CDIO educators.
After a short introduction by Johan Malmqvist, Kristina Henricson Briggs and Mikael Enelund from Chalmers, talked about the new initiative "TRACKS: An initiative for change, flexibility, interdisciplinarity and creativity in engineering education".
Bjørn Sortland is associate professor and head of Experts in Teamwork at NTNU gave a presentation called "Experts in teamwork at NTNU".
"Development of an entrepreneurship culture in a research focus university" was the title of Clément Fortin's talk. He is an Associate Provost at Skoltech in Moscow, the new international university founded in collaboration with MIT.
Senior lecturer Suzanne Brink gave a spech with the title "Curriculum changes towards agility and flexibility".
All talks were followed by fruitful discussions.
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The final panel discussion that further developed the discussions was lead by:
Aldert Kamp, TU Delft and CDIO co-director
Sakari Koivunen, Turku University of Applied Sciences
Per Lundgren, Chalmers University of Technology, MC2
Keynotes
For presentation of the keynote speakers, see seminar invitation
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From left: Suzanne Brink, Bjørn Sortland, Kristina Henricson Briggs, Clément Fortin, Johan Malmqvist (Organiser), Mikael Enelund