The CDIO Initiative was developed in the early 2000’s to respond to these needs and to, in effect, transform the culture of engineering education, producing a new synthesis of engineering science and practice, informed by scholarship on learning.
By 2010, more than 50 university programs have joined the CDIO Initiative. In some nations, the national standards, policies or practices are such that there are incentives for programs to adopt CDIO, or at least assert that they are adopting CDIO. This raises a central question of quality control.
The specific objective of this paper is to develop a CDIO Certification process that would meet these requirements. The central idea of this Certification Process is to set up a three level recognition of programs that sets programs on a journey to full implementation of CDIO.