Reforming Engineering Education
The CDIO™ Initiative

You hear the term "CDIO" a lot around MIT's Aeronautics and Astronautics Department. Just what is CDIO and why is everyone talking about it?

CDIO stands for Conceive – Design – Implement – Operate. Conceived in MIT's Aero-Astro Department in the late 1990s, CDIO is an innovative educational program for producing the next generation of engineering leaders and it forms the basis of your undergraduate education in MIT Aero-Astro. It ensures that you will have the opportunity to become competent in the skills industry needs so you can hit the ground running when you graduate.

The new vision

In recent years, engineering education and real-world demands on engineers drifted apart. We realized that we needed to close this widening gap. To do this, we had to conceive and develop a new vision.

The CDIO Initiative is the embodiment of that new vision. It offers an education stressing engineering fundamentals, set in the context of the Conceiving – Designing – Implementing – Operating process that engineers use to create systems and products. The CDIO Initiative is rich with student projects complemented by internships in industry. It features active group learning experiences in both classrooms and in our modern learning workshop-laboratory. And, it offers you, the student, the opportunity to partner in helping us continually improve the CDIO Initiative by participating in a rigorous assessment and evaluation process.

The need for CDIO

In recent years, industry began to find that graduating students, while technically adept, lacked many abilities required in real world engineering situations. Our task in MIT Aero-Astro is to produce technically expert, socially aware, and entrepreneurially astute aerospace professionals who will become the next engineering leaders. Faced with the gap between scientific and practical engineering demands, we took up the challenge to reform engineering education. The result of our endeavor is the CDIO Initiative.

To enter the engineering profession when you graduate, you'll need to be able to perform the essential functions of an engineer:

The Essential Functions of an Engineer
Graduating engineers should be able to
conceive – design – implement – operate
complex value-added engineering systems
in a modern team-based environment.

Stated another way, you'll need to appreciate the engineering process, contribute to the development of engineering products, and do so while working in an engineering organization. Implicit is the additional expectation that you should develop as a mature, thoughtful person.

Creating the CDIO Initiative

The first task we shouldered in designing our new educational program was compiling a list of the abilities needed by engineers. To do this, we formed focus groups of industry representatives, engineering faculty and other academics, university review committees, and Aero-Astro alumni. We asked the focus groups, "What are the knowledge, skills and attitudes that the graduating engineer should possess?" The groups' responses were charted.

We blended the focus group results with the industry and educators' wish lists and created a new syllabus (the outline of topics of study).

Curricular reform

We made changes to our courses, the sequence and manner in which they're taught, and their content; that is, to meet our learning goals we had to modify the Aero-Astro curriculum to meet them. We modified our curriculum to include design and build projects. We coordinated and linked conventional subjects to demonstrate the interdisciplinary nature of engineering. And, we created the Capstone, a challenging experience in which students design, build and operate a product system.

We also determined to make a great effort to encourage extracurricular learning by integrating internships, co-ops, and student-generated projects into your experience.

Teaching and learning reform

We know some interesting facts about how your experiences affect your learning. Engineering students tend to learn by experiencing the concrete and then applying the experience it to the abstract. The CDIO Initiative makes four important improvements to the way we teach and the way you learn: we increased active and hands-on learning, we emphasize problem formulation and solution, we thoroughly explore the underlying concepts of the tools and techniques of engineering, and we've instituted innovative and exciting ways of gathering your feedback.

Workshops-laboratories

As we've noted, engineers design and build systems and products. Workshops and laboratories are key to the CDIO learning environment. They support modes of active and hands-on learning including experimentation, social interaction, team building and team activity.

Since conceiving, designing, implementing and operating is the context of your education, we want to provide workshops and lab environments organized around C, D, I and O. Conceive spaces are largely technology-free zones that encourage interpersonal interaction, and include team and personal spaces conducive to reflection and conceptual development. Facilities must be provided that introduce you to digitally enhanced collaborative design, and allow you to implement fabrication and hardware/software integration. It's challenging to teach operation in an academic setting, but environments can be offered where you learn to operate your own experiments as well as perform faculty-generated class experiments. Simulations of real operations, and digital links to real operations environments supplement your experiences.

The Learning Laboratory

With the advent of our educational model, we needed to facilitate CDIO with a new learning environment. The result was the multi-million dollar renovation of Aero-Astro's Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory as our award-winning new multi-story Learning Laboratory, which includes the Gelb and Seamans laboratories and the Neumann Hangar.

Benefits and Open Architecture

CDIO benefits you, your future employers and our society. You will be well equipped to enter industry, and to design and build systems and products of benefit to humankind.

The CDIO Initiative was specifically designed as a template that can be adapted and adopted by any university engineering school. Fifteen other engineering schools on four continents are working with MIT to adapt CDIO to their own programs.

As a CDIO participant, your input is critical to how the program is shaped and how it will shape the engineering profession. We encourage you to share your thoughts, ideas and suggestions with your professors, instructors and your fellow students.

 

The CDIO Syllabus (Condensed)

1 TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE AND REASONING

1.1. KNOWLEDGE OF UNDERLYING SCIENCES
1.2. CORE ENGINEERING FUNDAMENTAL KNOWLEDGE
1.3. ADVANCED ENGINEERING FUNDAMENTAL KNOWLEDGE

2 PERSONAL AND PROFESSIONAL SKILLS AND ATTRIBUTES

2.1. ENGINEERING REASONING AND PROBLEM SOLVING
   2.1.1. Problem Identification and Formulation
   2.1.2. Modeling
   2.1.3. Estimation and Qualitative Analysis
   2.1.4. Analysis With Uncertainty
   2.1.5. Solution and Recommendation
2.2. EXPERIMENTATION AND KNOWLEDGE DISCOVERY
   2.2.1. Hypothesis Formulation
   2.2.2. Survey of Print and Electronic Literature
   2.2.3. Experimental Inquiry
   2.2.4. Hypothesis Test, and Defense
2.3. SYSTEM THINKING
   2.3.1. Thinking Holistically
   2.3.2. Emergence and Interactions in Systems
   2.3.3. Prioritization and Focus
   2.3.4. Tradeoffs, Judgment and Balance in Resolution
2.4. PERSONAL SKILLS AND ATTITUDES
   2.4.1. Initiative and Willingness to Take Risks
   2.4.2. Perseverance and Flexibility
   2.4.3. Creative Thinking
   2.4.4. Critical Thinking
   2.4.5. Awareness of One's Personal Knowledge, Skills, and Attitudes
   2.4.6. Curiosity and Lifelong Learning
   2.4.7. Time and Resource Management
2.5. PROFESSIONAL SKILLS AND ATTITUDES
   2.5.1. Professional Ethics, Integrity, Responsibility and Accountability
   2.5.2. Professional Behavior
   2.5.3. Proactively Planning for One's Career
   2.5.4. Staying Current on World of Engineer

3 INTERPERSONAL SKILLS: TEAMWORK AND COMMUNICATION

3.1. TEAMWORK
   3.1.1. Forming Effective Teams
   3.1.2. Team Operation
   3.1.3. Team Growth and Evolution
   3.1.4. Leadership
   3.1.5. Technical Teaming
3.2. COMMUNICATION
   3.2.1. Communication Strategy
   3.2.2. Communication Structure
   3.2.3. Written Communication
   3.2.4. Electronic/Multimedia Communication
   3.2.5. Graphical Communication
   3.2.6. Oral Presentation and Interpersonal Communication
3.3. COMMUNICATION IN FOREIGN LANGUAGES
   3.3.1. English
   3.3.2. Languages within the European Union
   3.3.3. Languages outside the European Union

4 CONCEIVING, DESIGNING, IMPLEMENTING AND OPERATING SYSTEMS IN THE ENTERPRISE AND SOCIETAL CONTEXT

4.1. EXTERNAL AND SOCIETAL CONTEXT
   4.1.1. Roles and Responsibility of Engineers
   4.1.2. The Impact of Engineering on Society
   4.1.3. Society's Regulation of Engineering
   4.1.4. The Historical and Cultural Context
   4.1.5. Contemporary Issues and Values
   4.1.6. Developing a Global Perspective
4.2. ENTERPRISE AND BUSINESS CONTEXT
   4.2.1. Appreciating Different Enterprise Cultures
   4.2.2. Enterprise Strategy, Goals and Planning
   4.2.3. Technical Entrepreneurship
   4.2.4. Working Successfully in Organizations
4.3. CONCEIVING AND ENGINEERING SYSTEMS
   4.3.1. Setting System Goals and Requirements
   4.3.2. Defining Function, Concept and Architecture
   4.3.3. Modeling of System and Ensuring Goals Can Be Met
   4.3.4. Development Project Management
4.4. DESIGNING
   4.4.1. The Design Process
   4.4.2. The Design Process Phasing and Approaches
   4.4.3. Utilization of Knowledge in Design
   4.4.4. Disciplinary Design
   4.4.5. Multidisciplinary Design
   4.4.6. Multi-objective Design
4.5. IMPLEMENTING
   4.5.1. Designing the Implementation Process
   4.5.2. Hardware Manufacturing Process
   4.5.3. Software Implementing Process
   4.5.4. Hardware Software Integration
   4.5.5. Test, Verification, Validation and Certification
   4.5.6. Implementation Management
4.6. OPERATING
   4.6.1. Designing and Optimizing Operations
   4.6.2. Training and Operations
   4.6.3. Supporting the System Lifecycle
   4.6.4. System Improvement and Evolution
   4.6.5. Disposal and Life-End Issues
   4.6.6. Operations Management