CDIO CONTRIBUTION TO ABET ACCREDITATION OF ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONIC ENGINEERING PROGRAMS

Abstract

ABET accreditation plays a very important role in enhancing higher education in technology and engineering disciplines. ABET accreditation is evidence to the fact that a collegiate program has met standards essential to produce capable graduates in fields of applied science, computing, engineering, and engineering technology. Graduates from an ABETaccredited program should be both effective and efficient in leading the way for innovation and in managing technologies so as to meet the needs of the general public. In our Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) program at Duy Tan University, Vietnam, the CDIO (Conceive-Design-Implement-Operate) project courses have been designed to help cover 5 out of 11 major student outcomes (i.e., creativity, teamwork, problem solving, communication, and lifelong learning). Our Faculty of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, over the past three years, has learned many tough lessons about how to effectively administer CDIO project courses to achieve student outcomes based on the ABET standards. In order to evaluate the contribution of CDIO project courses to our ABET preparations, we collected grading data of our EEE students and analysed them in order to examine and clarify the effects of the CDIO project courses to our student outcome achievement. Simple statistical methods on the grading data of CDIO project courses of the last three years showed significant effectiveness of the CDIO model to student outcome improvement as well as the close correlation of CDIO standards with ABET outcome criteria. However, current settings of our CDIO project courses also hinder their full capacity and effectiveness, namely in terms of the uneven skill proficiency levels of students from one batch to another, inadequate training in time and project management, insufficient preparation of lab materials for completely new projects, etc. Based on these results, we propose certain course of actions for the next two years in order to adjust our CDIO project courses to better serve the student outcomes set forth by ABET.