Collaboration

On March 12, the Opening Ceremony of the Annual CDIO Asian Regional Meeting, hosted by Duy Tan University, took place at the Novotel Danang Premier Han River hotel in Danang, with 200 renowned  speakers from 13 nations and territories, including: Vietnam, Canada, Thailand, China, Malaysia, Japan, South Korea, India, France, Kuwait, Philippines, Taiwan, and Singapore. This is also the first time the Regional CDIO Academy has been held at a Regional Meeting of the CDIO Initiative.

 

“DTU is very honored to be the host of this year’s event.”, Dr Le Nguyen Bao said during his Opening Ceremony speech. “We hope that the 2018 CDIO Asian Regional Meeting will offer participants a platform to share your knowledge and experience to all our CDIO members in lifting engineering education to new heights. In addition, this is also a great opportunity for technology students from the different universities in the region to join the CDIO Regional Academy to showcase their innovative projects.” 

Initially conceived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), CDIO is known as a standardized training process to design enrollment standards, study environment, and teaching methods based on output requirements (“outcome-based”). This process has been developed in a scientific and rational fashion, logical in its general methods and universally applicable to creating standardized processes for many different fields of education and training. The CDIO approach aims to educate students in a way that provides them with a comprehensive development in knowledge, skills, attitudes, practical capabilities, and sense of social responsibility.

 

 

The CDIO Initiative now has hundreds of educational institutions collaborating. The CDIO Academy in Asia has 28 members, with 5 from Vietnam, including the Viet Nam National University in Ho Chi Minh City, Duy Tan University, Thu Dau Mot University, Dalat University and the FPT University.

The thirteen speakers discussed innovation and creativity in engineering education practices. Some examples are the talks “Seeking Closure in Engineering Education Reform” by Prof. Ron Hugo, Chair in Engineering Education Innovation at the Schulich School of Engineering, University of Calgary in Canada;  “Teaching Design Thinking to Usability Engineering Students” by Dr Jolanda Tromp, Director of the Center for Visualization and Simulation, Duy Tan University ; “CDIO Thailand – A Network for Pedagogical Competence of the Community” by Assoc.Prof. Natha Kuptasthien, Head of Industrial Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Rajamangala University of Technology Thanyaburi (RMUTT); and “Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning” by Prof. Bernald Merialdo, Institut Eurecom in France.

  

In parallel with the Meeting, the CDIO Academy 2018 contest took place in an exciting atmosphere, with 41 students - 18 from abroad and 23 from Vietnam - participating as 16 teams. The projects presented for the contest resulted from studying and training with the CDIO educational framework at universities everywhere in Asia. At the closure of the contest, the first prize was awarded to the project “Dementia Patient Tracking Using Sigfox (an LWPAN Technology)” from Singapore Polytechnic, the second prize was awarded for “Wearable Tracker Using Ultra Low Power Communication Technologies” from the Ho Chi Minh City University of Information Technology, and the third prize came to “Utilisation of the Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate Framework in a Mechanical Engineering Capstone Project” from Taylor’s University, Malaysia.

The Closing Ceremony of the 2018 CDIO Asian Regional Meeting was joyful, with the contestants receiving their prizes and thus ending a really meaningful event boosting training with the CDIO method and opening many opportunities for exchange of experience between the universities using and really interesting in the CDIO model.