Sheridan College has just been accepted as a member of the CDIO Initiative – a worldwide movement to reinvent engineering education by restoring the balance between teaching ‘practice’ skills and the fundamentals of math and science. What started as a partnership among four universities in the US and Sweden has gained significant international traction with 103 institutions adopting the model. Sheridan is the fifth Canadian institution and the first college in the world to join.
As a new philosophy for engineering education, the CDIO framework educates students to Conceive, Design, Implement and Operate complex, value-added engineering products, processes and systems in a modern, team-based, global environment. Rich in project-based, hands-on learning, it aims to produce engineers who are ‘ready to engineer’ when they graduate.
The CDIO syllabus is intended to educate students in four major competencies: disciplinary knowledge and reasoning, personal and professional skills and attributes, interpersonal skills (teamwork and communication) and conceiving, designing, implementing and operating systems in the global enterprise, societal and environment context. It has twelve standards that institutions adopt to ensure the framework achieves its objectives, among them: learning outcomes, integrated curriculum, workspaces for social and group learning, and enhancing both faculty skills and teaching competencies in active and experiential learning.
The model was seen as a natural fit with Sheridan’s vision to become Ontario’s first undergraduate university dedicated to applied, professional education, built in an environment renowned for creativity and innovation.
Sheridan’s membership opens the door for potential collaboration in engineering education (such as joint projects, exchange courses, and program development ideas) with other partners on the continent such as MIT, Stanford, Notre Dame, and Queen’s as well as those further abroad such as Chengdu University of Information Technology (China), Singapore Polytechnic, Queensland University of Technology (Australia), Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden), Skolkovo Institute for Science and Technology (Russia) and Universidad de Chile.
The CDIO leader for Sheridan College is Dr. Farzad Rayegani, Associate Dean of the School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering & Technology. Sheridan extends a special thanks to three Canadian universities that helped us through the application process – the University of Calgary (Dr. Ron Hugo), Queen’s University (Dr. Rick Sellens) and École Polytechnique de Montréal (Dr. Sylvain Turenne).