Collaboration

From March 13th to 15th, two hundred delegate, from the CDIO association, businesses and universities worldwide met at the Rajamangala and Chulalongkorn universities in Thailand for the 2017 CDIO Asian Regional Conference.  Presentations included one by DTU entitled “Automatic assessment

of students’ performance and accreditation requirements”, which was well-received by the audience.

 

The CDI model is considered to be a new way of improving the quality of university education in Engineering, to meet the ever increasing requirements in the workplace. Worldwide, CDIO currently has one hundred members from well-known Engineering universities, with 22 from Asia.

In Vietnam, only four institutions have been admitted so far, including DTU, the first private university to enter after the National University of Chi Minh City, and recently Thu Dau Mot University and Dalat University.

Sixteen delegates from countries including Canada, Sweden, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and China were invited to present. Current topics of special interest worldwide were covered, such as “Industry transformation: Challenges and opportunities for engineering education” by Lim Peng Hun, Singapore Polytechnic Deputy-Principal (Technology & Industry); “What industry expects from university graduates, Future trends” by Dr. Sampan Silapanad, Vice-President and General Manager of the Thailand of Western Digital Corporation; “Engineering education in the digital age” by Dr. Ron Hugo, from the University of Calgary in Canada; and “Innovations in engineering education at Yeungnam University, a hub for engineering education” by Professor Song Dong Joo, Senior Vice-President of the Accreditation Board for Engineering Education of Korea (ABEEK).

 

As an active member since 2012, DTU was honored to be the only representative from Vietnam to be invited to present, to share its experiences in applying CDIO with the regional members. The talk entitled “Automatic assessment of students’ performance and accreditation requirements” was given by Dr. Tran Nhat Tan, Director of the DTU Center for Quality Assurance and Examinations. He talked about the design and development of a student output evaluation system, which has been integrated into the study management software system LMS (/AMS), the foundation of the electronic university model DTU has been running with positive results for several years already, geared towards meeting the stringent requirements of international accreditation systems.

Commenting on the importance of creating an electronic system for the assessment of student abilities and giving his opinion of the DTU presentation, Dr. Ron Hugo from the University of Calgary said, “Evaluating the abilities and skills of students is very important and requires a lot of resources from universities. To train skilled engineers with solid professional skills that meet the ever more stringent requirements from businesses in particular requires universities to expend uninterrupted effort and creativity throughout management and training. Student performance assessment is also being implemented at the University of Calgary at level two under the CDIO scheme, which is why we were very happy to hear a talk on student performance assessment being implemented at level four under the CDIO scheme at DTU, because we can exchange and gain experience to apply this at the University of Calgary in the most effective way.”

The 2017 International CDIO Conference will be hosted by the University of Calgary, in June. Experiences of implementing CDIO at DTU will be presented again there. Five DTU papers have been accepted to date. DTU is also very honored to be hosting the 2018 CDIO Asian Regional Meeting and detailed information on this will be updated regularly at: http://cdio2018.duytan.edu.vn.