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The purpose of engineering education is to provide the learning required by students to become successful engineers—technical expertise, social awareness, and a bias toward innovation. This combined set of knowledge, skills, and attitudes is essential to strengthening productivity, entrepreneurship, and excellence in an environment that is increasingly based on technologically complex and sustainable products, processes, and systems. It is imperative that we improve the quality and nature of undergraduate engineering education.

The objective of engineering education is to educate students who are “ready to engineer,” that is, broadly prepared with the pre-professional skills of engineering, and deeply knowledgeable of the technical fundamentals. It is the task of engineering educators to continuously improve the quality and nature of undergraduate engineering education in order to meet this objective. Over the past 25 years, many in industry, government, and university programs have addressed the need for reform of engineering education, often by stating the desired outcomes in terms of attributes of engineering graduates. By examining these views, we identified an underlying need: to educate students to understand how to Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate complex value-added engineering products, processes and systems in a modern, team-based environment.

We will now develop a comprehensive approach to answering the first of the two questions, central to the reform of engineering education, posed in Chapter Two.

As discussed in the previous chapters, there are compelling reasons for university engineering programs to educate students in a broad set of personal and interpersonal skills, and product, process, and system building skills, as well as to instruct them in the technical disciplines. We argued that the best way to accomplish this is to stress the fundamentals, and to set the education in the context of conceiving-designing-implementing-operating products, processes, and systems (the essence of CDIO Standard 1); that students are expected to achieve a comprehensive set of learning outcomes, as defined by the CDIO Syllabus; and that learning outcomes should be comprehensive, be consistent with program goals, and be validated by program stakeholders (the essence of Standard 2). The first three chapters have laid out a process to answer the first of the two central questions.

In this chapter, we continue our discussion of the resolution of the second question central to the improvement of engineering education— In Chapter Four, we examined how the curriculum can be restructured and retasked, in order to strengthen the links between the disciplines and weave the necessary skills into the curricular plan. In this chapter, we will examine perhaps the most important device to meet the demands placed on an integrated engineering curriculum—the design-implement experience.

This chapter broadens and concludes the discussion of the second question central to the reform of engineering education: The curriculum design process, presented in Chapter Four, develops an approach to integrating learning outcomes into the curriculum. Design-implement projects, discussed in Chapter Five, are a principal mechanism to create dual-impact learning experiences, and therefore, both fulfill the skills learning outcomes and deepen students’ understanding of disciplinary knowledge.

The last three chapters have discussed answers to the second of the two questions central to the reform of engineering education: Integrated curriculum, design-implement experiences, integrated learning, and active and experiential learning are the main components of a reformed engineering education that better ensures that students reach the intended outcomes required of all engineering graduates. Implicit in the question ” is an additional question:

Adapting and implementing a CDIO approach can potentially be of great value to educational programs and the students they serve. However, that means change—an inherently challenging endeavor, especially at a university. Program leaders are more likely to succeed in this change process if faculty are equipped with an understanding of how to bring about change, and provided relevant guidance and resources. This chapter discusses the implementation of a CDIO approach in terms of three change processes: cultural and organizational change, faculty development and support, and program change.

In previous chapters, we described key characteristics of a CDIO program. First, we addressed we should teach: learning outcomes that address disciplinary content, as well as personal and interpersonal skills, and process, product, and system building skills.We went on to discuss we should teach: an integrated curriculum; a sequence of design-implement experiences in workspaces specifically designed to support them; integrated teaching, learning, and student assessment. In Chapter Eight, we presented approaches to enhance faculty competence in these skills and in teaching methods.

When engaging in the reform of engineering education, it is important to understand its historical context. For over 150 years, educational institutions have played a major role in shaping the skills and professional identities of engineers. During this period, the appropriate approach to engineering education has been the subject of constant discussions and controversy. Major changes have occurred both in the way engineering education is organized and in its relation to science education. Radical changes have also occurred in the technologies and technical specialties within engineering. Despite this history, and particularly in view of the controversies surrounding the role of engineering education since the late 1960s, engineering schools have been surprisingly stable in their basic philosophy regarding the structure and core content of the engineering curriculum. Only modest reforms have been implemented in the curriculum and pedagogy of engineering education in several decades. Most of these reforms have been focused on increasing the number of technical engineering topics, and solving the resulting problems of disciplinary congestion.