CDIO Regional Meeting - Asia-Pacific

This presentation shares the work done by the author in developing a pedagogy for evidence-based flipped classroom. This presentation builds like the practice of medicine, teaching in general and learning in particular, must also be evidence-based. It further posits that one can do so by leveraging on more in-class interaction time afforded by flipped classroom. The author first introduces the audience to flipped classroom and shared his motivation for doing so. Next, he briefly shares the approach he had developed to implement evidence-based flipped classroom, which was derived from the works of other authors in areas of the sciences of how humans learn, effective classroom strategies (in terms of its effect size) as well as a set of core principles of learning based on heuristics of the learning process. He also suggests that the collection of evidence of learning can be mediated by the use of suitable EdTech tools. The outcome of such a synthesis is a pedagogy for evidence-based flipped classroom. This is followed by examples of work done, and a brief discussion of students’ feedback on their learning experience.

Smart cities are no longer the wave of the future. There are more and more communities getting integrated with technology innovation. As a result, those innovations have brought positive impacts to boost economic growth, efficiency, sustainability, and quality of life. A university is very much a part of the city it is in and its thousand students can play an important role to contribute into making smart and even smarter cities. This talk outlines a variety of opportunities the students can make this happen, in which the universities act as a bridge between the students and the cities.

Teaching Design Thinking to Usability Engineering students is extremely useful because it gives them a systematic methodology to find solutions to complex problems. Design for innovation consists of problems that are typically ill-defined and solutions are unknown. Usability engineers focus on creating an understanding of design problems by researching the needs of the human users. Design thinking is based on finding user-centered solutions by re-framing the problem in human-centric ways. It teaches them how to generate ideas and do rapid prototyping and testing. There are many variants of the Design Thinking process in use today, but they are all based upon the same principles, that can be used to guide design teams to collaboratively find solutions. This presentation describes the experiences of teaching Design Thinking to Usability Engineering students in a flipped classroom setting, where students study the methods online and apply what they learned in the classroom, working in small teams on several different design challenges, simulating a real world environment.

RMUTT has participated in Conceive, Design, Implement, and Operate (CDIO) Framework for Re-Thinking Engineering Education since 2013. RMUTT has integrated CDIO-based Education into the university’s strategic plan. Major changes and improvement involve in integrated curriculum development, workspace renovation, teaching and learning methods, faculty member competency enhancement as well as assessment methods. RMUTT has been appointed as a CDIO collaborator in the CDIO Worldwide Initiatives since March 2014. From 2016, CDIO-based Education has expanded to 9 Rajamangala University of Technology (RMUTs). CDIO Thailand as strong network to develop pedagogical competent of the community, we promote quality of higher education through achieving excellent curricula, learning environments and processes, and high quality learning outcomes.

In this presentation, the speaker will share the inspiration that propelled Singapore Polytechnic to join the CDIO movement more than 14 years ago. He will share the lessons learned and progress made by Singapore Polytechnic in adopting CDIO and other teaching and learning innovations. He will touch on how Design Thinking and FabLab were introduced to strengthen CDIO implementation. Looking into the future, the speaker will share how Singapore Polytechnic is currently reviewing its course curriculum to prepare its students for the challenges of tomorrow.

The purpose of this talk is to introduce the experience of implementing CDIO in Feng Chia University (FCU). Currently, FCU encourages all the departments to establish their own CDIO curriculums, and ensure that every student takes at least 20% of total credits related to Project-Based Learning before graduation with the hope to develop students’ ability to integrate professional knowledge and practice. The current courses offered in this series cover Freshman Project, Deep Learning Project, and Capstone Project.

In April of 2018, Kanazawa Technical College (KTC) will open the new school year as International College of Technology Kanazawa (ICT). The educational program planned for this transformation is radically different from anything a Japanese 5-year College of Technology (or Kosen) has tried before. It combines an intensive education on a boarding-style campus with compulsory overseas study and collaborative projects from local communities and industries in a primarily English curriculum. How does a school originally founded to produce factory workers in the Kosen system evolve into an internationally-minded, interdisciplinary engineering school with a focus on authentic design projects? This talk will illustrate the social, organizational, and human factors that have driven KTC to become international in a comparison of the historical context of the Kosen system to modern drivers for change.

Curriculum for four-year undergraduate Engineering and Technology programs is generally designed aiming to achieve Program Educational Objectives (PEOs) through attainment of Graduate Attributes (GAs) and Course Outcomes (COs). Though the CDIO syllabus clearly portrays ‘What to teach’ and standards expound ‘How to do it’ through pedagogical processes, it is still felt that students face difficulties in choosing flexible route to acquire required disciplinary knowledge, personal, professional, interpersonal and CDIO skills at their own learning pace to achieve optimal career options from freshman engineering to capstone. This study explores the professional competence and transferable skill-acquisition routes to the students during their program of their study vis-à-vis landing in desired career. Prior to admitting the students, activity-based “Freshman Acquaintance Program (FAP)” is conducted for the prospective students who are willing to pursue their higher education in Engineering and Technology. The outcomes of the FAP addressed certain skills such as 2.1-Analytical Reasoning and Problem Solving, 3.1-Team work and 3.2-Communication listed in the CDIO Syllabus v2.0. In this study, ‘m’ number of clusters, which comprise of knowledge and skills, is mapped to ‘n’ number of career options. Based on the curricular topology for optimal career options drawn in the beginning of the program of study, students chose the cluster of courses in different categories, underwent those courses and now in the Capstone stage achieving their targeted career dreams.

Project education has played an important role in engineering education. Many researchers and educators have focused on the innovation of content design, the implementation methods, the evaluation method and transformation of achievements. This speech mainly focuses on innovative exploration and practice of project education from the perspective of innovation and entrepreneurship education. Based on the OBE (Outcome-based Education) theory, this speech explores and analyzes the mode of education, teaching methods and the corresponding results of project education. Based on the innovation and entrepreneurship education in IT project education, this paper redesigns the education mode, project results, evaluations and the use of project results. This speech also takes the internationalization IT project (named as innovation entrepreneurship IT project) in Dalian Neusoft University of Information (DNUI) as an example, which is an international cooperation project between DNUI and University of Queensland (UQ). Additionally, this paper discusses the practice framework, implementation priorities, problems and solutions of this international IT project. The result shows that the international IT project education integrated with innovation and entrepreneurship education can improve the participation of the students through OBE transformation. The research will also provide references for the engineering education model and innovation ways based on OBE Theory.

This talk presents the strategy of enhancing professional competency of academic staff at Thu Dau Mot University. Since 2015, Thu Dau Mot University has adopted the CDIO framework in designing and developing all training programs to promote active, authentic, and practical learning. Learning-centered approach by using diverse teaching models, such as blended learning, project-based learning, and experiential learning is also required to be applied. More importantly, improving academic staff’s competency is a long-term strategy of the university. To date, Thu Dau Mot University has designed an integrated framework of instructor competencies and training interventions, including multi-day training workshops focusing on various teaching skills, such as course design, assessment design, online design and instruction, presentation skills, facilitation skills, and so on. The positive results reported are that academic staff could be able to design and deliver constructively-aligned courses that integrate authentic, higher-order learning tasks, and students’ active learning is promoted.