Designing Process Enablers to Strengthen Professional Skills in Project Work 2.0

"Designing Process Enablers to Strengthen Professional Skills in Project Work 2.0. Case studies of the CDIO activities at Aarhus School of Engineering.”

Based on the 12 CDIO standards we (Wivel, Flarup) will write a paper that is specifically based on:

Standard 9 — Enhancement of Faculty Competence Actions that enhance faculty competence in personal and interpersonal skills, and product, process, and system building skills.

This paper intends to elicit an issue which we have formerly described in a paper and presented at the CDIO conference in Boston, June 2013 (Harvard University): "Designing Process Enablers to Strengthen Professional Skills in Project Work". As then we describe different actions, methods and tools to enhance the students’ personal and interpersonal skills in project work and we also describe how the faculty since then has developed an organizational learning culture which is focused on this issue in order to develop "whole and sensible engineers" (Crawley, MIT).

We will:

# Explain the introduction of CDIO personal and interpersonal skills as a strategic decision followed by training of the staff in order to work with the variety of activities at the Aarhus School of Engineering. This part of the paper describes a change management process - namely, how to work with the implementation of the social CDIO skills.

# Continue the issue from our first paper: By this focus on the students well-being we have recognized a significant downward rate of students who drop out of the studies, we see a significantly fewer requests about a bad team work, we see that students voluntarily and on their own initiative are aimed at proactively to request to the team coach, if the group beforehand can see some issues that might could provide cooperation problems. We though don’t see yet better graduation marks or that they go faster through their studies towards their graduation. In short we find that the students are considerably strengthened in terms of social intelligence (CDIO standards of personal and interpersonal competences). This part of the paper will be related to an earlier paper by the authors (Flarup, Wivel) held at MIT / Harvard, in June 2013 on the then still relatively new effort.

# Explain the best cases from work with students and teachers. The paper will deal with a number of best cases published on a closed Youtube channel and distributed for the CDIO conference participants: • How does the individual student develop their personal and interpersonal skills through the CDIO activities? • How does the staff handle the double role of being involved in personal and interpersonal activities? • How does the strengthening of personal skills of the students influence their academic skills and professional level, including their learning in the classroom? Can we see any correlations to the average grade levels? • What kind of learning do the students take out from CDIO intention to be "whole and sensible engineers" (quote Crawley, MIT)? Do the students see that the activities are rooted in the CDIO framework?

Proceedings of the 13th International CDIO Conference in Calgary, Canada, June 18-22 2017