Engaging Stakeholders and Capturing Their Opinions

There are several alternatives for gathering stakeholder input, including interviews, focus groups and workshops. Surveys also are common and produce quantitative data on reactions. Whatever method is used, two design features of 

To have experienced or been exposed to To be able to participate in and contribute to To be able to understand and explain To be skilled in the practice or implementation of To be able to lead or innovate in 

Whatever alternative is used, stakeholders must be posed a question that does not allow them to respond that all items are equally important. Several qnestions can be asked, including What level of proficiency should the students achieve as they graduate An alternative question is What is the relative importance of these topics , assuming that students should be more proficient at more important tasks. A third way to ask is Relatively how much time should be spent on this topic Experience shows that all of these will give about the same result. The first is more directly transferable to learning outcomes, and is, therefore, the recommended question. 

In the example of the four universities, the survey process used a questionnaire to collect data from stakeholders about the expected proficiency levels of CDIO Syllabus vl.O topics. The survey instrument asked questions in such a way that information was collected for each item in the Syllabus at the second, or X.X, level of detail. Both quantitative and qualitative responses were solicited. Respondents were given a set of definitions based on the third level of detail (Table 3.2) to ensure reasonable consistency of interpretation and increase the reliability of the responses. Respondents were also given the CDIO Syllabus at the fourth level of detail and background reading on the program. 

For each second-level (X.X-level) Syllabus topic, respondents were asked to indicate an expected proficiency level using a 5-point scale. Table 3.6 shows the rating scale. Scale points designate absolute levels of proficiency expected in the activities or experiences of engineers. They are not relative measures of skills compared with 

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