The 16 CDIO International Conference

Working Group: CDIO as Community of Practices

The purpose of this information is to make it conceivable for possible working group members to figure out if they will be a good candidate for a working group.

Name: CDIO AS COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE AND CHANGE AGENT

Problem:

In 2020 the CDIO Initiative will be celebrating 16 years and has been adopted by about 160 engineering schools around the world. Over the past years, the CDIO Council and other community members have been discussing its mission and vision statements and two important issues that are directly related to updated statements:

• The structuring of the community and developing a ‘core’ CDIO community of practice – to create more engagement, improve accountability and strengthen shared practice;
• The evaluation of the CDIO framework – its value and impact on the development of our engineering graduates, academic staff practices and identity and the engineering community.

The aim of this working group is to discuss and develop a concept for each of these issues. The structuring of the community is mainly process and logistic oriented, the evaluation of the framework more research oriented

Questions:

What is the constellation of the CDIO community and what are the mechanisms that will enable the community to work as an effective community of practice, building community capacity and improving the engineering education through realistic evaluation, reflection, feedback and shared repertoire?
How has the CDIO framework and its implementation shaped the engineering education for the past 16 years? What evidence do we need? How do we collect this evidence? How do we interpret the collected evidence?

Leaders:

Nicoleta Maynard, Monash University, Australia (nicoleta.maynard@monash.edu)
Aldert Kamp, TU Delft University, the Netherlands (A.Kamp@tudelft.nl)

Application:

Application for joining the working group on CDIO as Community of Practice is done by filling out the application form Here and emailing it to the working group leader (Nicoleta Maynard, nicoleta.maynard@monash.edu or Aldert Kamp, A.Kamp@tudelft.nl)

Things to be done before the physical conference:

1. Identify community of practice frameworks relevant to the development of a successful ‘Core’ CDIO community of practice.

a. What would be a ‘Core’ CDIO community’s reason to exist – its influence, relevance and motivation?
b. Who should be part of the ‘Core’ community? Who must interact and how regularly? How would the interaction look like keeping in mind that the community should be a place of exploration, experimentation, evaluation and reflection?
c. What would be its shared practice? How would a successful practice (balance between joint activities, evaluation and knowledge creation) look like?

2. Identify relevant data collection procedures that will allow us to evaluate the impact of the CDIO framework. Use the institutions of the working group participants as case studies and identify any challenges and patterns that may need to be addressed..

a. What impact the introduction of the CDIO framework has had on curriculum development at your institution?
b. How did curriculum changes adopting the CDIO framework, impact the engineering education at your institution?
c. How did CDIO implementation change the pedagogical practices?
d. What was the impact on the academic staff at your institution? (behaviour, adoption, change in teaching practices etc.)
e. What data does your institution have, showing the impact on students’ development, are our graduates able to ‘conceive, design, implement and operate complex value- added engineering systems in a modern team-based environment’?

An agenda and any supporting material for reading ahead of the meeting will be sent.

What is expected to be the output of the face-to-face meeting?

• A framework and conceptual process description for the development of a ‘Core’ CDIO community of practice – ideally, one for each region
• A research framework, research questions and a plan for data collection and analysis. A draft schedule for a research publication.

How will the finalization of the state-of-the-art paper be organized?

Roles and action points will be agreed at the conclusion of the meeting.

Other relevant information:

We would like to also highly encourage researchers with experience in engineering education /social/organisational psychology research to be part of this group.