CDIO AND COMPETENCY-BASED LEARNING APPROACHES APPLIED TOGETHER TO MILITARY ENGINEERING EDUCATION

The CDIO consists of a curricular approach customized to the reality of engineering undergraduate courses, considering several specialties, and which was built from a large-scale survey of knowledge, skills and psychological characteristics currently required of the engineer. On the other hand, competency-based learning is a methodology that is used in several courses in the Brazilian Army, which connects different areas of knowledge and, instead of focusing on theory, aims to prepare for a professional action that mobilizes knowledge, resources, attitudes, values, and skills in specific situations in professional life. In this methodology, students have access to a curriculum made up of integrated modules to develop new capacities, practical, technical, cognitive, and socio-emotional skills and to teaching based on problem situations. In this context, it is possible to identify the synergy between these two approaches. It was precisely the convergence between these two curriculum construction systems that made it possible to develop a hybrid methodology at the Military Institute of Engineering (IME), which integrated the CDIO and the Competency-based Learning methodologies used by the Brazilian Army. It should be noted that another challenge is to keep this hybrid methodology in line with the Curriculum Guidelines for engineering education in Brazil. Therefore, this paper makes a comparison between the main concepts and the sequence of actions necessary to build an innovative curriculum, contemplating both approaches, which can facilitate the understanding of the reform currently underway at this Institute.