CDIO Faculty Development Course

On October 25th and 26th 2016 one of two CDIO Faculty Development Courses was held at the Department of Product & Production Development at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. The course focused on imparting knowledge about CDIO, and how to integrate innovation, entrepreneurial and business skills in the technical programmes to the participants that are engaged in teaching and development of MSc programmes.

About 30 participants from all over Europe listened to presentations about Program Development, Course Development, Industrial Engagement on Teaching, CDIO Case-studie, CDIO tools for Teaching Material, Design Build-Simulation Based Learning and CDIO-Business and Entrepreneurship. During the 2-day course, the participants developed skillset and ideas for developing CDIO based projects and learned how to improve teaching methods into their respective MSc programmes and teaching.

– The course captured input from experts from CDIO and education developers. It is always good to hear the experiences of others on how did they use CDIO and learn from them. The course is having a wide range of Design Built Test based learning examples, Programme Development examples which gave audience ideas and inspirations to develop their own courses and programmes. The crucial part of any course is constructive discussion with peers, Kanishk Bhadani, organizer of the course, says.

– The course was really useful to find opportunities to improve my courses, said one of the participants after the course. The response from the participants was overwhelming positive, they thought that the most valuable part of this course was the diversity of input and the opportunity to learn from others, both speakers and the cross-disciplinary audience.

About the course
This course was funded by EIT Raw Material. Existing MSc programmes which are linked to the thematic Raw Material content are often very technical and students graduates as professional students who knows how to solve well defined and often non‐realistic problems. Students in such programmes seldom practice entrepreneurial, communication and innovation skills. However the CDIO initiative focuses on implementing the entrepreneurial thinking into such technical programmes. By implementing CDIO, students will get more of real problems which are cross disciplinary, includes societal and business aspects and are complex and ill‐defined for which ‘one right answer’ are exceptions etc. Another result of CDIO implementation is that students will be better prepared for necessary working skills through a better understanding of the engineering process and the whole raw material chain.

Organized by: Dr. Erik Hulthen, Associate Professor and Kanishk Bhadani, Department of Product and Production Development, Chalmers University of Technology

Sponsors and Partners:
• Luleå University of Technology, Sweden
• TU Clausthal, Germany
• TU Delft, Netherlands
• UP de Madrid, Spain
• University of Limerick, Ireland
• Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden
• LKAB, Sweden
• RUSAL Aughinish Alumina, Ireland
• SP, Sweden

CDIO Faculty Development Course at the University of Limerick, January 2017

SAVE THE DATE! The next CDIO Faculty Development Course will be held on January 10th-11th, 2017 at University of Limerick Campus, Limerick, Ireland

For more information, please contact:
Dr. Lisa O’Donoghue, School of Engineering, University of Limerick
Email: lisa.odonoghue@ul.ie
Phone: 00 353 61 20 2910
 
The invitation will be sent out in in the end of November. The Faculty Development Course is designed in conjunction with and to compliment the course at Chalmers University of Technology held on 25-26th October 2016.