Educational Program Evaluations: Rationalizing Assessment Models and Processes for Engineering Education Quality Enhancement

Engineering and managing educational systems remains today relatively informal, relying on shared best practices and rationales. On the one hand, in the higher education sector, international reference models permit to continuously improve the quality of educational systems (e.g. EFQM or the CDIO standard 12 for engineering education). Such frameworks are commonly used as a complement to quality systems stimulated at national level by regulation bodies or ministries (e.g. formal accreditation systems). The corresponding models incorporate a continuous improvement system, but without formal reference models per maturity levels, nor repeatable objective evaluation processes.

On the other hand, the field of software engineering has experienced a crisis several years ago and was able to cope it methodologically. It is now recognized that software quality is largely dependent on the quality of the design, development and maintenance processes. This has led many companies to align with reference model, and focus on process evaluation. As an example, the ISO 15504 (SPICE) provides a comprehensive framework for the evaluation and improvement of processes. This standard has been adapted and successfully used for specific sectors (automotive, aerospace, banking, medical, etc. ). It is based on a framework with three kind of models: (i) Capability Maturity Model, (ii) Process Reference Model, and (iii) Process Assessment Model.

The CDIO standard 12 proposes an evaluation model with a maturity scale that covers the implementation of standards, i.e. focusing on aspects of the organization, but no standardized assessment process exist, blurring its capacity to support repeatability and comparability. SPICE defines requirements on the evaluation processes, and a guide for the evaluation processes. Moreover, evaluation models include indicators for assessing process maturity: practices, inputs, outputs, resources, etc. Other frameworks like EFQM include dimensions on outcomes (performance, satisfaction, impact). The main contribution of this paper is to analyze the aforementioned quality frameworks and evaluate them in the context of higher education quality assurance, so as to propose more formalized process reference models and process assessment models to better manage educational systems in engineering,

Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014