Curricula design model for designing and evaluating systems and computing engineering programs

Recently, there has been a big movement towards converging engineering education and practice by means of defining clear and complete program goals. In this context, a large scale of educational institutions face challenges on how to specify the desired educational goals for a specific discipline and on how to instantiate and evaluate their program-specific designs according to these goals. We have defined a curricula design model for designing, redesigning, and evaluating systems and computing engineering (S&C) programs. The core of this model is the orientation to projects for the definition of educational goals that facilitate the definition of courses that integrate a set of these desired goals. This paper presents the core elements of the curricula design model and the methodology to instantiate it into a new program design that satisfies a desired professional profile. The curricula design model has been validated through its instantiation for redesigning the S&C program at the University of Los Andes in Colombia.