First Year Experience of CDIO Adoption into an Information Technology Program

The Faculty of Information Technology, University of Science has been selected and supported financially by the Vietnam National University – Ho Chi Minh to adopt CDIO into its program. The 7-year CDIO adoption project has been set up and started to improve the teaching and learning quality at the school. However, it is a big challenge due to the fact that the adoption process will be carried out for the whole school with 4 departments, over 2000 students, and 150 faculty members. Although all departments are IT-related, their teaching and learning styles are a bit different. Two are research-oriented and the others are industryoriented. In addition, although CDIO has been introduced for over 10 years now, the number of documents on the CDIO website to instruct you how to adopt CDIO into school programs are very limited. The documents tell you very briefly and generally about the adoption process. Thus, as a newcomer, we found it quite difficult to follow. This paper describes steps that the school has gone through and difficulties encountered during the 1st year of the process. After one year adoption, we have built up a new CDIO-based learning outcomes and the CDIO-based curriculum structure to an existing program. We also did self evaluation based on the rubrics analysis within the 1st 4 months and did it again at the end of the 1st year to see the progress.