The deep changes in the global context bring about the need of enhancing the engineering curricula and their transparency in order to support the greater international mobility of engineering students and graduates, promote and improve the "offer" of EU Universities and meet the requirements of enterprises.

This cannot be achieved without a “common language”, shared by all the European higher education national systems, understood by enterprises and also recognisable by students, universities and business stakeholders outside Europe. In fact, the European engineering higher education area is not yet homogeneous: the processes of implementation of the BMD (Bachelor – Master – Doctorate) schema and the use of the ECTS (European Credit Transfer System) aren’t still completed. There are deep differences among the EU member states about the meaning of “engineer” and if the Bologna Declaration has initiated a reform, it is actually still not well implemented by all European Countries; moreover, the period of transition of the early adopters makes the situation more complex.

How can we foster mobility, better employment, competences growth Europe-wide and the attractiveness of the European higher education area in the engineering field, if it is difficult for all the actors involved to recognise degrees and competences?

Actually, on one hand, the European Qualifications Framework (EQF) has just provided a learning outcomes – based approach which can really help players build a common language and a common understanding, not yet linked to any specific disciplinary areas apart from some sectoral experimentations and the framework for languages. On the other hand, the CDIO (Conceive, Design, Implement, Operate) already represents a common syllabus for the design of engineering programs and degrees and for their evaluation, and it is based on the same learning outcomes (objectives) approach used by the EQF. Furthermore, the CDIO is an approach adopted by worldwide engineering Universities, its implementation in specific disciplines considers the involvement of stakeholders from industry and so it could speed up the mutual transfer of innovation between Universities and businesses.

The main objective for the DOCET project main objectives is the development and test of an EQF-CDIO correspondence model. A standard way of translating qualifications descriptions into learning outcomes, according to the EQF descriptors, as well as criteria to assign EQF levels to sets of learning outcome will be developed.

The project is financed by the European Commission, through the Erasmus Mundus programme. The project participants are Politecnico di Milano (Italy), Associació Catalana d’Enginyers de Telecomunicació (Spain), Comité d’Etudes sur les Formations d’Ingénieurs (France), École Polytechnique de Montréal (Canada), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) and Chalmers.

Dr Johan Malmqvist, professor
Birgitta Carlsson, Chalmers Administration & Service