O-CDIO : Engineering Education Framework with Embedded Design Thinking Methods

Technology and its applications have an ever-increasing role in our daily lives. Healthcare, logistics, commerce, manufacturing, and even social interaction, all have aspects of technology embedded in them. The complexity and importance of the technical systems we use varies, yet they are becoming increasingly versatile and more important to the functionality of entire systems and their services. At the same time, the complexity of understanding the future needs of the role that technology plays in such systems and what they are supposed to deliver varies from linear to chaotic. This has had a fundamental impact on the engineering profession. The more complicated, complex or even chaotic a system is, the more innovative and cooperative an engineer needs to be. Thus, engineers also need to understand people. This thesis presents a novel engineering education model, O-CDIO, which is based on an existing framework known as the CDIO framework. The O-CDIO model is derived from the results of the university level engineering education reform enacted in a multidisciplinary science university in Northern Europe, and from the scientific discourse within the domain of the engineering education research and literature. The timeline for the research was fall 2011 to fall 2015. The model that was developed emphasizes the need to educate engineers to become problem definers in addition to educating them to become problem solvers. This can be achieved by integrating human-centered design thinking methods and challenges into engineering courses from day one to graduation. The results of the piloted courses in the reform process show that transferable working life skills, such as communication, teamwork, problem-solving, prototyping skills, and tolerance towards ambiguity, were enhanced. These skills are widely seen as necessary for future engineering. The preliminary results also show that the courses provide an opportunity for self-discovery, increased self-efficacy, and result in an increase in entrepreneurial thinking. There were clear limitations to this research. The piloted courses had no control groups. The reflections on and comparisons of the results were achieved by considering the results of similar studies and the literature. Although some of the courses were run for three consecutive years, this research has very little longitudinal evidence. Future research should focus on implementation of the O-CDIO model as a whole, with longitudinal research set as one of its goals.Teknologian rooli maailmanlaajuisesti verkottuneessa teollisuudessa ja yhteiskunnassa on merkittävä ja ennustettavissa olevan tulevaisuuden ajan myös kasvussa. Se on myös enenevissä määrin sekä monimutkainen että moniulotteinen. Terveydenhuolto, teollisuus, koulutus, liikenne, ja internet, jopa sosiaalinen kanssakäyminen ovat esimerkkejä aloista ja ilmiöistä jotka ovat jollain tavalla riippuvaisia niiden sisältämän tekniikan toimivuudesta. Samaan aikaan teknologioiden ja tekniikan roolin ymmärtäminen sen eri konteksteissa on haastavampaa. Tekniikalla ei ole itsetarkoitusta. Sen tehtävä on aina palvella. Tämä asettaa uudenlaisia haasteita diplomi-insinööreille ja heidän kouluttamiselle. Tekniikan koulutus yliopistotasolla on maailmanlaajuisesti kyennyt vastaamaan sille asetettuihin haasteisiin. Tosin lähes poikkeuksetta muutos on syntynyt ulkoisen muutostarpeen aiheuttamana. Mitä monimutkaisemmaksi ja moniulotteisemmaksi tekniikalle ja teknologioille asetetut vaatimukset kehittyvät sitä monipuolisemmaksi pitää myös koulutuksen muuttua. Tämä tutkimus ja tieteellinen raportti perustuu suomalaisessa monialayliopistossa tapahtuneeseen tekniikan koulutuksen muutosprosessiin, tuloksiin sen aikana pilotoiduista kursseista ja alan kirjallisuuteen. Tutkimuksen tuloksena syntyi tekniikan koulutuksen malli joka johdettiin edellä mainituista tutkimuksen tuloksista, olemassa olevasta tekniikan koulutusmallista nimeltä CDIO ja kirjallisuudesta. Mallin ydinidea on kouluttaa diplomi-insinööreistä ongelmanhahmottajia ongelmanratkaisijoiden lisäksi. Tämä tapahtuu integroimalla ihmis- ja käyttäytymistieteisiin perustuvia opettamismetodeja läpi koko koulutuksen ensimmäisestä päivästä valmistumiseen asti. Reformin aikana tehdyt tutkimukset osoittivat että opettamismetodit saavuttivat niille asetetut oppimistavoitteet. Työelämätaidot kuten viestintä-, ryhmätyö-, ongelmanratkaisu- ja prototypointitaidot lisääntyivät. Alustavat tulokset myös osoittivat että opiskelijoiden reflektointikyky ja positiivinen suhtautuminen yrittäjyyteen lisääntyivät. Lisätutkimuksen tarve aiheeseen liittyen on ilmeinen. Tutkituissa kursseissa ei ollut mahdollista käyttää kontrolliryhmiä eikä O-CDIO mallia ole missään vaiheessa testattu kokonaisuudessaan. Lisäksi pitkän ajan vaikutuksia ei voitu tutkimuksen ajallisista kestosta johtuen testata. Pisimpään samanlaisena pysyneeltä kurssilta saatiin tutkimusaineistoa kolmelta eri vuodelta. Lisäksi tämän raportin kirjoittaja vastasi myös lähes poikkeuksetta tutkittujen kurssien ideoinnista, kehittämisestä ja opettamisesta. Tämä on otettu analyysivaiheessa huomioon mutta silti vaikuttaa tutkimustuloksiin. Luonnollinen lisätutkimuksen aihe on tutkia O-CDIO mallia kokonaisuudessaan todellisessa tekniikan koulutuksen kehyksessä ja riittävällä aikajänteellä.Siirretty Doriast

Analysis and Detection of Information Types of Open Source Software Issue Discussions

Most modern Issue Tracking Systems (ITSs) for open source software (OSS) projects allow users to add comments to issues. Over time, these comments accumulate into discussion threads embedded with rich information about the software project, which can potentially satisfy the diverse needs of OSS stakeholders. However, discovering and retrieving relevant information from the discussion threads is a challenging task, especially when the discussions are lengthy and the number of issues in ITSs are vast. In this paper, we address this challenge by identifying the information types presented in OSS issue discussions. Through qualitative content analysis of 15 complex issue threads across three projects hosted on GitHub, we uncovered 16 information types and created a labeled corpus containing 4656 sentences. Our investigation of supervised, automated classification techniques indicated that, when prior knowledge about the issue is available, Random Forest can effectively detect most sentence types using conversational features such as the sentence length and its position. When classifying sentences from new issues, Logistic Regression can yield satisfactory performance using textual features for certain information types, while falling short on others. Our work represents a nontrivial first step towards tools and techniques for identifying and obtaining the rich information recorded in the ITSs to support various software engineering activities and to satisfy the diverse needs of OSS stakeholders.Comment: 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE2019

The conceptualisation, practice and value of Design Thinking in Entrepreneurship Education – an Educator’s Perspective

The thesis illustrates how entrepreneurship educators understand Design Thinking (conceptual understanding), how and on what level they apply it in their entrepreneurship teaching (educational practice) and why and for what perceived value they choose to do so (perceived value). By adopting a more critical and differentiated perspective on this integration than previously reported in the existing literature, this research study provides novel insights to the question of the conceptualization, practice and value of Design Thinking for Entrepreneurship Education – from an educator’s perspective. It follows an interpretive and qualitative approach, drawing upon semi-structured interviews from 29 entrepreneurship educators from Higher Education in the UK andNorthern Europe. Thus, the thesis demonstrates that entrepreneurship educators integrate Design Thinking in many ways and for different reasons.As a result, this thesis synthesises existing perspectives on Design Thinking (toolset, process, mindset) and defines a framework for the four forms (selective, idea-centric, procedural, holistic) of Design Thinking integration in the context of Entrepreneurship Education. The findings suggest that perceived values of Design Thinking could be explicit and implicit and that entrepreneurship educators integrate Design Thinking to provide value for their students’ learning but also to develop their own teaching practice. Overall, this study contributes to unfolding the Design Thinking concept and advocating a common ground among educators’ sense-making of a Design Thinking integration in Entrepreneurship Education. In conclusion, this study reaffirmed the wide application of Design Thinking within Entrepreneurship Education but presented the new centrality of the educator’s perspective at the core of the discussion on its utility and thus, moving towards convergence of a common understanding. The findings of this research would be of interest for entrepreneurshipeducators and entrepreneurship education researchers who seek a more profound and reflective integration of Design Thinking within Entrepreneurship Education

Using agent based simulation to empirically examine complexity in carbon footprint business process

Through the critical analysis of the extant literature, it is observed that Simulation is widely used as a research method in Natural Sciences, Engineering and Social Sciences, in addition to argumentation and formalisation as the third way of carrying out research. Simulation is not so widely used in Business and Management research as it ought to have been, though this is changing for the better with the technological advances in computers and their computational power. These technological advances enhance the capability of theoretical research models, in defining a problem and their use in empirically examining a solution to the problem in simulated reality, like never before. Management journal searches for “Simulation and Complexity Theory” returned nil or zero returns, which explain that this combination is not popular in management research, though they are used individually more often. The major objective of this paper is to analyse some of the conceptual (or theoretical) and methodological (or empirical) contributions that Agent Based Simulation and Complexity Theory can make to the business and management community in their business process related research In view of this, some basic ideas are discussed of using Agent Based Simulation as a method in Business and Management Studies research and how an Agent Based Model can be applied to a business process as complex as Carbon Footprint. It is in this context that the use of Complexity as the base theory to empirically examine a business process is discussed. Throughout this article, our research on complex adaptive systems (e.g., Accounting Information System) in continuously changing organisations managing complex business processes (e.g., Carbon Footprint business process) is considered as the basis for illustrating some of the concepts. Through this article, avenues for further management research using these tools and methodology are suggested

Design research in the Netherlands 2010 : proceedings of the symposium held on 20-21 May 2010, Eindhoven University of Technology

Design Research in the Netherlands occurs every five years to take stock of the state-of-the-art in design research that takes place in all design disciplines in the Netherlands. How has our understanding of design developed through research on this phenomenon? What are the research and development methodologies used to acquire insight in design? What have we achieved in the past period, and what are out expectations for the coming period? Researchers and research groups outline their development over the past five years in position papers, addressing insights, methods, results, and problems. Design Research in the Netherlands 2010 is the fourth edition, following three symposia held in 1995, 2000, and 2005. The five-year cycle allows to take conceptual distance from everyday problems that are often project-specific, and to assess how the field is developing. The proceedings form a valuable cross-disciplinary overview of research on design

A Toolkit for Practice-Based Learning of Mechanisms in Industrial Design Education: An Application of a Method Combining Deductive and Inductive Learning

Industrial design education is focused on teaching a combination of various interdisciplinary competencies. One of these projected learning outcomes is to be able to design mechanisms in order to fulfil certain mechanical constraints in products. Studies show that theoretical knowledge supported by practice helps to teach industrial design students the mechanisms. In the current situation in Turkey, practice-based courses are designed in a similar purpose. However, graduates severely lack mechanical design skills. In this study, a two-staged toolkit of a holistic flow is introduced to prevent the deficiency mentioned above. In the toolkit, mechanisms are taught by combining deductive and inductive approaches, instead of a directly inductive conventional approach. The toolkit is applied to 36 sophomore year students. Assessments of the students and their self-evaluations are collected and analysed. Findings show that the toolkit can be beneficial for teaching of mechanisms to ID students through some revisions

Transferring Collective Knowledge: Collective and Fragmented Teaching and Learning in the Chinese Auto Industry

Collective knowledge, consisting of tacit group-embedded knowledge, is a key element of organizational capabilities. This study undertakes a multiple-case study of the transfer of collective knowledge, guided by a set of tentative constructs and propositions derived from organizational learning theory. By focusing on the group-embeddedness dimension of collective knowledge, we direct our attention to the source and recipient communities. We identify two sets of strategic choices concerning the transfer of collective knowledge: collective vs. fragmented teaching, and collective vs. fragmented learning. The empirical context of this study is international R&D capability transfer in the Chinese auto industry. From the case evidence, we find the expected benefits of collective teaching and collective learning, and also discover additional benefits of these two strategies, including the creation of a bridge network communication infrastructure. The study disclosed other conditions underlying the choice of strategies of transferring collective knowledge, including transfer effort and the level of group-embeddedness of the knowledge to be taught or re-embedded. The paper provides a group-level perspective in understanding organizational capabilities, as well as a set of refined constructs and propositions concerning strategic choices of transferring collective knowledge. The study also provides a rich description of the best practices and lessons learned in transferring organizational capabilities.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39804/3/wp420.pd