IMPACT ANALYSIS OF ACADEMIC REFORMS FOR CDIO IMPLEMENTATION: CASE STUDY

Thiagarajar College of Engineering (TCE), Madurai, India is a member of Worldwide CDIO Initiative and has been practicing CDIO based curriculum from the academic year 2018-19.. The self-assessment of CDIO standards has been carried out meticulously by the CDIO group members of the institute in the academic year 2017-18 and a detailed action plan has been evolved for enhancing CDIO skills. As a first step, the curriculum of undergraduate programmes has been revamped to promote Design–implement Experience and Integrated Learning Experience. New courses like Engineering Exploration, Lateral Thinking, Design Thinking, Project Management, System Thinking and Capstone Projects are offered to promote technical, personal and interpersonal skills. As a second step, to enhance Faculty Teaching Competence, exclusive in-house training programmes on CDIO skills and pedagogical training programmes in association with international experts have been successfully conducted. Successful implementation of Engineering Projects in Community Services (EPICS) Program at TCE has resulted in 164 prototypes to address location-specific community problems. A new framework has been developed to introduce a wide variety of assessment methods to assess technical, personal skills and interpersonal skills of learners. An in-house customized web application for effective assessment of learning outcomes has been developed. This article presents the impact analysis of the academic reforms made in the curriculum, content delivery and assessment at TCE in enhancing the rating scale for the CDIO standards namely Design - implement experiences, Integrated Learning Experiences, Active Learning, Enhancement of Faculty Teaching competence and Learning Assessment. It can be observed that there is great positive impact of these academic reforms not only in improving the ratings of CDIO standards but also in getting national level accreditation and in improving the ranking of the Institute.