EVALUATION OF LEARNING OUTCOMES IN CDIO PROGRAMME WITHIN CIVIL ENGINEERING

The CDIO approach to engineering education was implemented at all bachelor of engineering programmes at Technical University of Denmark (DTU) starting from the fall semester 2008. The study programme within civil engineering starts twice a year in September and February, and at summer 2010 a total of approximately 200 students have completed their 1^st semester on the CDIO version of the programme. The current version of the programme is briefly described in the paper with focus on the Design-build projects and the CDIO – project based courses.

We asked students from the first class in 2008 to fill in a questionnaire about learning environment and their learning outcome related to the CDIO project in 1^st semester. The questionnaire was a supplement to another one, which is used for all courses at the university as a standard evaluation form, [1], [2]. The students were asked to fill in the questionnaire during the final part of the semester (December 2008).The results from those evaluations were used to improve the first semester project course, which as a consequence is modified slightly every time, [1].

During the spring semester 2010 the students from the first class are studying their 4^th semester and work on a new design-build project. They were asked to fill in a new questionnaire and some of the students were interviewed too. Students’ learning outcomes and their experiences with engineering methods were evaluated in the new questionnaire and the interviews. Focus was on students’ reflections on how and what they learned, and also what motivates learning. We learned that the Design-build activities and interdisciplinary projects help students to learn thinking and working as engineers, but also that we can still improve. We also learned that coherence between activities in different courses running simultaneously could be improved.

We work continuously on improvements of the individual courses and the entire programme. Basically, the development is based on guidelines as described in a local handbook for CDIO implementation at DTU, [3], which again is based on the general CDIO approach, [4]. Experiences with the CDIO-concept in the civil engineering programme at DTU are still few, and we have therefore chosen to work in several areas: One is the students’ motivation, another is alignment and evaluation of individual courses and the third is enthusiasm of the teachers. All three areas are considered to be important for students’ learning outcome. This was confirmed in the evaluation.