Architecting the CDIO Educational Framework Pursuant to Constructive Alignment Principles

On the one hand, no one international model for quality assurance evaluation of higher education has emerged. On the other hand, as a reference model rather than a prescription, the CDIO initiative proposes a mature integrated framework for creation or continuous improvement of engineering programs. However, institutions developing and managing educational programs have to juggle the expectation of various accreditation and evaluation bodies, which may create consistency and interoperability problems. A need exists to unambiguously specify relations among quality assurance concepts to enable more transparent and comparable descriptions of quality frameworks for educational programs. Following constructive alignment principles, this article creates structural models using some of the CDIO Standards. In doing so it lays the foundations of an architectural meta-model for describing complex educational systems, which will contribute to consistency and interoperability among quality frameworks.