Student Competence Profiles – a complementary or competetive approach to CDIO?

For students to develop independent learning strategies, it is essential to have anunderstanding of what it is they are aiming for. For this reason, every educational programme in Sweden has learning outcomes as stated by the Swedish Higher Education Authority.However, these are rather formal and sometimes described in a way that is not easy, either for teachers or for students, to implement in teaching and learning activities. A challenge is to both apply CDIO-standards and comply with the Swedish Higher Education Authority’s stated learning objectives. At the same time, we should uphold students’ motivation to develop their competences and teachers’ understanding of which teaching and learning activities are relevant, and how and what to assess in students’ learning to contribute to all of these approaches. The aim of this paper is to describe the development of a competence profile. The idea is primarily based on the Vitae Research Development Framework, but with inspiration from several other frameworks and approaches. The competence profile is designed to support students´ individual professional industrial design engineering competences. It allows the students themselves to map their knowledge, skills, experiences and qualities, and also provide support for teachers’ feedback and assessment. In other words,the student competence profile is used to describe what students are supposed to be able to do (prior to courses), what the learning activities are supposed to contribute to (during courses) and for formative and summative feedback of how well it has been done (during and after courses). It also allows a visualisation on how different courses contribute to the overall programme objectives.Godkänd; 2016; 20160403 (petert)