Using CDIO Self-Evaluation for Quality Assurance and Accreditation

The Diploma in Chemical Engineering course at Singapore Polytechnic has successfully completed its 5-year CDIO implementation that began in Academic Year 2008. The details of our implementation are covered in another paper entitled “The Diploma in Chemical Engineering CDIO Experience after 5 Years of Implementation” prepared for this Conference. This present paper shares the approach taken by the DCHE Course Management Team to align its CDIO implementation and self-evaluation process to the institution’s quality management systems and holistic education framework, as well as the requirement spelt out by the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) UK, which recent re-accredits the course for 5 years from 2012 to 2016.

We firstly outline our internal quality assurance system, known as the Academic Quality Management System (AQMS) which is based on the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) cycle of the ISO9001:2008 system; and the People Developer Standard (PDS) for developing faculty competency. We show that the CDIO Standards can be readily mapped to the key processes and outcomes of AQMS and PDS requirements. Secondly, we evaluate our implementation effort by comparing work done against the CDIO Standards and identify areas for improvement. We also map the skill competency in CDIO Syllabus directly to the graduate attributes of SP Holistic Education, as well as IChemE’s outcome-based accreditation criteria which calls for an integrated curriculum embedded with general transferable skills (i.e. CDIO skills), topics on ESH (environmental, safety and health) as well as ethics and sustainable development.

Lastly, we conclude, through our recent re-accreditation, that our success in meeting the IChemE requirements is largely due to our systematic process of curriculum redesign using CDIO, focusing on delivering the best learning experience for students; rather than with any explicit intention of meeting accreditation criteria per se.

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.