Student Competence Profiles – a Complementary or Competitive Approach to CDIO?

For students to develop independent learning strategies, it is essential to have an understanding of what it is they are aiming for. For this reason, every educational program in Sweden has learning objectives stated by the Swedish Higher Education Authority. However, these are rather formal and on a very high level, and not that easy for neither teachers, nor students to implement in teaching and learning activities. CDIO is designed to stimulate development of educational programs with the goal of achieving more competent engineering students. Likewise, CDIO do not satisfy a need for a simple and straightforward approach for teachers and students to apply learning strategies. The MSc program in Industrial Design Engineering at Luleå University of Technology (LTU) joined the CDIO in 2015 as a pilot project. A challenge is to both apply CDIO-standards while still comply to Swedish Higher Education Authority’s stated learning objectives. At the same time, we should uphold students’ motivation to learn and teachers understanding of what teaching and learning activities that are relevant, and how and what to assess in students’ learning to contribute to all of these approaches. For this reason, we have developed a Student Competence Profile. The idea is based on the Research Development Framework (http://www.vitae.ac.uk). The profile is designed to create a professional framework for the development, planning, promoting and supporting the personal and professional development. It allows the students themselves to map their knowledge, skills, experiences, and qualities. In other words, the Student Competence Profile is used to describe what students are supposed to be able to do (prior courses), what activities are supposed to contribute to (during courses) as well as for assessment of how well it has been done (after courses). The Competence Profile states the individual characteristics that are required for achieving a MSc degree in Industrial Design Engineering at LTU. It covers Swedish Higher Education Authority’s stated learning outcomes, but in a simpler, and more straightforward, way. It also allows an elaborate visualisation on how different courses contribute to the program's objectives.

Using the Student Competence Profile as illustration, in this paper we address the following questions: - What can be gained by introducing a new approach to asses knowledge, skills, experience and qualities. - How can these three different approaches (Swedish Higher Education Authority’s learning objectives, CDIO standards, and Student Competence Profiles) co-exist, and complement each other?

One challenge in implementing CDIO is to change both students and teachers’ understanding of the curricula, and how CDIO can be applied in teaching and learning activities. Central in the Student Competence profile is to set goals and use steps to help achieve these goals. Drawing on theories of metacognition as a learning to learn, and theories of motivation, and design skills, this paper presents how three different assessment standards can co-exist, and how the Student Competence Profile can contribute to students' learning.

Proceedings of the 12th International CDIO Conference, Turku, Finland, June 12-16 2016