Sculpting the Sculptor: Designing a Faculty Support Program for New CDIO Member Institutions

The University of Pretoria is a new member to CDIO but not new to engineering education. The drive to align our activities to reasonably correspond to international engineering education methods, is not an isolated incident, but part of a continuous cycle of didactic evolution. The CDIO initiative does however present an opportunity and impetus to this quest. The people factor in faculty members may at times leave some of them unconvinced and even unequipped to deal with the challenges modern engineering education presents. Changes are required from the methods lecturers themselves experienced as students and while most staff would readily acknowledge the fact that they are primarily engineering specialists and not didactic experts, the nature of the task at hand call for mastery of both disciplines.

This paper reports on an initiative at the University of Pretoria to identify faculty needs in this regard. It also reflects the necessary interventions to support faculty in not only changing their own approaches where necessary, but in taking the lead to ensure that our learners’ abilities reflect the necessary competence.