CDIO (Our Teaching)

We pride ourselves on our practically relevant courses

For undergraduate students that means engaging in practical, cross-disciplinary project-based work.

Developing undergraduate students into successful and impactful engineers and designers requires more than technical knowledge and skills. Our ethos is to cultivate and develop our students' practical engineering skills, social awareness, team and project management abilities.

Through this ethos our students develop a broad skill set that contributes to their high performance in engineering problem solving.

We take a practical, project-based approach to teaching and learning. We have made a decision to transition from traditional intense and assessment-heavy teaching to a culture where students have space and encouragement, learning to learn for themselves.

Advantages for you as a student include:

• Industrially relevant modern degree programmes
• Exciting and impactful programme from the first day on the course
• Develop confidence to tackle real engineering problems
• Focus on a reduced number of modules and assessments
• Integrated multi-disciplinary programmes
• Progress beyond basic technical ability, develop a breadth of skills.

This philosophy is supported by 50 of the world’s top technical institutions, including Aston, who have gathered to share best teaching practice in what is known as the CDIO (Conceive, Design, Implement & Operate) initiative. Universities we work with on this initiative include Liverpool and Queens (Belfast) in the UK, MIT and Purdue in the United States, Chalmers and the Danish Technical University in Scandinavia and Tsinghua in China.

Aston students have a history of winning high profile awards, see our achievements in the Barcelona CDIO conference.

Summer 2019 Conference 

During summer 2019, several academics and 3 undergraduate students attended a CDIO conference in Denmark. The conference featured presentations, discussions and workshops about the initiative. The Aston students were split up and put into groups with students from other universities. These teams worked on a challenge to come up with solutions to international water problems, and an Aston student was on the winning team.

One of the Aston students said: "The CDIO conference in Denmark was an amazing experience to showcase skills learnt during my time at Aston and I enjoyed applying new ideas and innovation to future problems whilst working alongside a group of international students."