Renewal Of A Local Concept For Engineering Education Including CDIO

The education concept of School of Engineering (JTH) in Jönköping, Sweden was established in the mid 1990-ies and included a view that apart from a strong core of technology, each engineering curricula should include education in leadership, entrepreneurship, finance, environmental demands as well as relevant engineering skills and practice. Moreover, it should also emphasize aspects like international orientation, industry contacts and employability. This proved to be a fruitful idea both internally for quality development and externally for marketing the school to possible students. After about 15 years JTH had grown into one of the leading undergraduate engineering schools in Sweden and CDIO principles were to a large extent implemented in all its curricula at bachelors’ level. At this stage it was decided that the concept should be updated to continue to fulfill its purpose. This paper describes the first part of the renewal process of development in terms of its organizing as well as the influences that were taken into consideration concerning education of professional engineers. The resulting structure and content of the new concept to be implemented during the coming two years are outlined. The new concept is nowtsupposed to include both undergraduate (3 years) and master programs (2 years). The newtconcept is based on a core of the technology taught and additional course modules that aretsupposed to add knowledge, skills and acquaintance knowledge to the curricula. The technical education will be built up by basic science, advanced science, niche and system knowledge. The developed modules should bring the complementary subjects in a form and way that make them better integrated in the curricula. Moreover, a course called Off-campus integration theory and practice is introduced, bringing more depth of skill and acquaintance with the industry into the curricula.

Proceedings of the 9th International CDIO Conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 9 – 13, 2013.