CDIO Initiative

Concept

The CDIO concept was originally conceived at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the late 1990s. In 2000, MIT in collaboration with three Swedish universities — Chalmers University of Technology, Linköping University and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology — formally founded the CDIO Initiative. It became an international collaboration, with universities around the world adopting the same framework.

CDIO collaborators recognize that an engineering education is acquired over a long period and in a variety of institutions, and that educators in all parts of this spectrum can learn from practice elsewhere. The CDIO network therefore welcomes members in a diverse range of institutions ranging from research-led internationally acclaimed universities to local colleges dedicated to providing students with their initial grounding in engineering.

The collaborators maintain a dialogue about what works and what does not and continue to refine the project. Determining additional members of the collaboration is a selective process managed by a Council comprising original members and early adopters.

The CDIO revised syllabus consists of four parts:

1. Disciplinary knowledge and reasoning
2. Personal and professional skills and attributes
3. Interpersonal skills: teamwork and communication
4. Conceiving, designing, implementing, and operating systems in the enterprise, societal, and environmental context

The following institutions collaborate in the CDIO initiative: