Student Learning Experiences Concerning Enterprise & Societal Context in CDIO-based Education

The CDIO Syllabus includes a section dealing with Enterprise, Societal and Environmental Context (Section 4) that was extended in 2011, which implies its growing importance. The goals and content of this section differ from those of the core engineering sections and include awareness of the impact of engineering on society and environment as well as management of people and resources. It may be challenging to teach and learn these topics within the timeframe of already dense educational programs. In this paper we present both the ways of incorporating this section into curricula and a survey of student learning experiences using engineering programs at Linköping University, Sweden, as the empirical setting. Our study covers five engineering programs: Applied Physics & Electrical Engineering; Computer Science and Engineering; Engineering Biology; Industrial Engineering & Management; and Mechanical Engineering. The results show that some of the programs incorporate Section 4 topics mainly through project courses where student teams work on specified assignments within their programs’ focus area (such as software) while training their project management skills and gaining insights into business and societal context. Other programs, especially Industrial Engineering & Management, include several courses where Section 4 topics are learned through lectures, seminars, experiential learning and less extensive group assignments. The results from our survey of students’ learning experiences show that students vary in their evaluation with regard to section 4 topics, with for example Mechanical Engineering students valuing their program higher than others when it comes to their learning about responsibilities of engineers to the society. Industrial Engineering & Management students on the other hand value their program higher than others concerning learning of topics such as business context. We also show that extra-curricular activities in the form of active engagement in students clubs at the university are beneficial for developing leadership abilities during engineering education.

Proceedings of the 9th International CDIO Conference, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 9 – 13, 2013.