The development and implementation of an ...

The development and implementation of an educational model for Community Service Engineering Work Integrated Learning and international interaction M. Niemi University West Trollhättan, Sweden [email protected]

I. Vervoort Thomas More Geel, Belgium [email protected]

O. Shabalina Volgograd State Technical University Volgograd, Russia [email protected]

J. Dekelver Thomas More Geel, Belgium [email protected] K. S. Johansson University West Trollhättan, Sweden [email protected]

Abstract— This paper describes the educational model four partner countries have developed in the context of Community Service Engineering (CSE). CSE is a project co-funded by the European Commission within the Lifelong Learning Programme 2013-2016.

In the last two paragraphs the paper pays detailed attention to the role of the teacher/professor and the future plans partners have for the CSE curriculum. Here the concept of ally partners will be explained and a call to join the consortium will be launched.

All participating institutions start from real-life project work with technology students (EQF level 6 or 7). All partners underpin this project work with a taught programme and the mentoring of the students. All students create an online portfolio in which they illustrate both the process and the final result of their project.

Keywords—Inclusion; Multidisciplinary; Society; Networking; Work Integrated Learning

(International) interaction is stimulated in the project based coursework in various stages and for various reasons. International interaction is also facilitated via the taught programme to touch hot topics and compare between country contexts. The paper sums up the four building blocks which form the educational model and are the stepping-stones to move forward the real-life project work and allow for (international) interaction with students and other stakeholders. In the next paragraphs the paper identifies the prerequisites, process and outcomes that made collaboration for Community Service Engineering possible on the level of institutions, teachers/professors and students. Here we also touch the importance of networking with partners in the field in the various countries. The CSE curriculum also offers new opportunities and perspectives for them.

I.

CONTEXT

This paper describes the educational model that four partner countries have developed and implemented in different degrees in the context of Community Service Engineering (CSE). CSE is a project co-funded by the European Commission within the Lifelong Learning Programme (LLP) 2013-2016. The term Community Service Engineering refers to the engineering of products, product-service combinations or services that fulfil well-being and health needs mainly in the social domain, and in this project specifically for vulnerable groups in society. Examples of these groups are persons with different disabilities, elderly persons, refugees, unemployed persons or individuals with substance abuse problems. The underpining educational design in this project is the umbrella term of Work Integrated Learning (WIL). This design rests on the notion that students learn more/better/deeper if their studies arrange for learning where it happens. This design emphasises authentic learning in different contexts such as campus based learning (courses, writing theses etc) and/or in work - life (applying knowledge, organisational learning etc). In order to create this it can be of great help using the metaphor

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of students as brokers with the aim to bring and bridge knowledge and skills between different contexts. WIL in higher education broadly refers to on-campus learning combined with work experiences that integrate theory with practice in academic learning programmes. This is a broad term that includes cooperative education programmes, internships, practicums, project-based learning, sandwich programmes and service learning. WIL programmes have become increasingly popular in many countries and represent a collaborative effort by both industry and institutions of higher education to enhance student learning[1]. In the CSE curriculum students take (online) courses and do assignments in interaction with students and stakeholders from different fields and countries. Furthermore, they are assigned to a project that is developed from a real need from a person that belongs to a so called vulnerable group. The problem is negotiated between the client, the academic supervisor and the student. This could lead to a win-win-win situation for all involved parties[2]. All participating institutions start from real-life projects and work with technology students (EQF level 6 or 7). All partners underpin this project work with a taught programme and the mentoring of the students. All students create an online portfolio in which they illustrate both the process and the final result of their project. (International) interaction is stimulated in the project based coursework in various stages and for various reasons. •

In the initial stage research is done to detect already existing technology and relevant resources in relation to the need/challenge students are developing a solution for.

•

In the course of the project students are invited to interact with various stakeholders in order to have a better understanding of the needs and values of the target audience their solution will serve and to gather feedback from peers in order to improve their designs.

•

At the final stage of the project students are encouraged to maximise the valorisation potential of their project’s end results. There are various options in this final stage: o

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Students might want to start up their own business based upon the insights gained and prototype developed.

o

Students might want to offer their findings and prototype to stakeholders (organisations, businesses, umbrella organisations,…) active in the domain.

o

The project’s end result might need further research, development, iteration of prototypes and validation which is best done in the context of the Higher Education Institutions itself (HEIs), which act as open innovation hubs for societal innovation and transformation.

Students are stimulated to interact with various stakeholders both on a local and on an international level. This is important since businesses active in the social domain are often operating in niche markets and need a European or global scope to find enough market potential. Students’ projects in particular and the CSE educational model in general could make the bridge to find the needed market. II.

FOUR BUILDING BLOCKS FOR COLLABORATION

The first building block consists of a shared database in which partners introduce the project ideas they have gathered from the social domain (organisations, companies, research groups,…) or that students came up with themselves. Partners keep the database update. They change the statuses (as administrators) from vacant into planned, ongoing and finished. Once finished they add the URL that leads to the student's portfolio in which the project’s end result and process are documented. This first building block is crucial to provide students with potential ideas for project work, illustrate which ideas are being undertaken in the various countries and to identify which students would benefit from interacting with one another since they are working for a similar target audience or are developing related technologies. Students can connect on their own initiative or via the teacher who acts as a linking pin. The second building block is the design thinking template which partners have identified as a shared approach for the project work. This template is based on the work of IDEO[3]. Via this design thinking template students are urged to organise national and international (online) meetings with peers in order to collect feedback to improve their results. The project based course work as key element is underpinned by a taught programme. The entire curriculum is organised as dynamically as possible. Among the participating higher education institutions, learning outcomes for CSE have been defined based upon the CDIO framework[4]. Minimally institutions offer the course content via the short online track, which is the third building block. Many institutions however enrich this content with the resources available on the shared learning platform (Feedback Fruits)[5]. The Feedback Fruits platform is the fourth building block. On Feedback Fruits partners have installed a CSE Knowledge space, Research space and Coaching space. In the Knowledge space all teaching resources and learning materials for CSE are gathered and made available. These can consist of PowerPoint presentations, streamed lectures, existing video material, articles, references to literature,… The Research space helps to bring forward the long term vision for Community Service Engineering. From an educational model where the results of an engineering student’s project are secondary to the cognitive skill level a student can prove, in the next ten to fifteen years the focus of engineering student projects will shift towards truly solving societal (sub)problems, as a small contribution in a bigger and longer open innovation process the HEI is involved in[6].

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The Coaching space illustrates the CSE pedagogies and puts the students into action. Items are assignments for project work in the CSE context, Work Integrated Learning (WIL), reflection methods and formative feedback, description of methods to support Human/User Centred Design and Participatory Design, worksheets, evaluation criteria for project work. III.

COLLABORATION ON THE LEVEL OF INSTITUTIONS

At the initial stage the HEI involved in the LLP project agreed on the same vision. A document stated they would jointly develop a multi-campus blended learning environment to offer engineers an innovative curriculum with a strong mix of theory and practice in real life settings. The profile of Community Service Engineering would be added to their engineering profile. At the same time these partners agreed to focus on engineering as being a social undertaking and not a pure technical undertaking. Engineering is a process that starts with understanding people’s and/or organisational needs and ends with actually bringing products and services to these people/organisations. The profile would start as a postgraduate course initially. For a postgraduate course (continuous/adult education) there are fewer formal requirements, the approval procedures are easier, no account should be taken of how to integrate the CSE profile into existing and already overcharged engineering curricula. Therefore, starting as a postgraduate course would be ideal to develop, test and further design this new curriculum for engineers. However, it soon turned out that the economic crisis and austerity had amplified the pressure on higher education and not all partners in the lifelong learning project were given ‘carte blanche’ to launch a new postgraduate course. Cooperation within a single postgraduate was therefore no option. So alternative ways of cooperation were to be found. Belgium kept its plans to develop a separate postgraduate course. It was launched and pioneered in the academic year 2014-2015. Next it has been integrated as a track in an already existing postgraduate course named the Postgraduate Programme in Innovation and Entrepreneurship in engineering. The Netherlands initiated the idea of a diploma supplement for its technological bachelors. This idea was also introduced in Belgium for technological bachelors and named the diploma supplement ‘socially ingenious'. Portugal took up the CSE curriculum as a course in its Centre for Continuing Engineering Education. Furthermore the University of Porto stimulated its master students to undertake a master thesis with a clear social dimension. In implementing the project for the master thesis, Portuguese students are also urged to seek contact with the target audience and interact with other stakeholders. Students gain access to the short online track and the design thinking template that provides support in this undertaking.

Sweden also chose to stimulate its students to do a master thesis for the social domain and support them in doing so via the design thinking template and the short online track. Furthermore Sweden saw potential for Community Service Engineering in some project based course units that are part of the regular engineering curriculum. As a side effect, they also saw that there are opportunities for both Swedish and international engineering students to participate in a course with students from social work. Working in the shared context of Community Service Engineering provided the incentive to enter into Erasmus interinstitutional agreements as HEI’s. These agreements allowed for staff mobility for teaching under the Erasmus programme. The institutions also agreed that virtual mobility should be in place to add recent and relevant topics in a dynamic way to the short online track which forms the basis for the taught programme. During the project’s lifetime this virtual mobility has been set up in the form of online conferences/webinars with participation of students and staff of the various institutions. Here we also want to stress the importance of maintaining a network with partners in the field in the various countries. The CSE curriculum also offers new opportunities and other perspectives for these partners. Belgium clearly had an advantage of being close to the RVO Society[5]. This partner in the field already had ten years of experience in stimulating technological innovation in organisations in the social domain and prompting them for real-life project ideas. The other partner countries still had to identify their strategic partner(s) in the field in order to initiate a demand driven approach for reallife project work. Sharing the same vision is an important asset to achieve a common goal but it is not sufficient to make things happen. The HE area has gone through major changes over the last years, often driven by budget related issues. CSE was facing the same challenges in all countries. Co-funding of the EUcommission was important to provide time and resources to work on the development of a curriculum that could later on be continued in a sustainable way. At institutional level, all partners met challenges of different sorts, often very much linked to local institutional circumstances, but in every case, linked to budget constraints. Innovation of higher education is today submitted to the laws of economics: innovation, not accompanied by a good business plan, is not likely to happen. For most partners, this resulted in a solution that integrated CSE in the existing curriculum as much as possible, with additional costs restricted to the minimum. IV. COLLABORATION ON THE LEVEL OF TEACHERS Mintzberg already defined higher education institutions as professional bureaucracies, meaning that the power of what happens lies with the operating core, being the teachers/professors. Mintzberg attributed a highly decentralised structure as a characteristic to HEI’s. In these structures teachers hold a good deal of the power. They do so, first individually and then in small specialist units, but not in one homogeneous collectivity. Professional organisations typically

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house all kinds of professionals, each with his or her own needs and interests[7].

an important role here as linking-pin. Via a form in the design thinking template and via the project’s database however students can find who else is working on CSE projects and can connect even without the teachers having to intervene.

Mintzberg’s theory became apparent in practise for Community Service Engineering. Top management (cf. institutions) could support the vision of developing the profile of Community Service Engineering. Next the right staff that could make this happen had to be recruited for the LLP project.

Community Service Engineering is a curriculum taught in English, which shapes opportunities for international/exchange students.

A good strategy appeared to be the teaming up of staff from the field of engineering on the one hand and the field of social work on the other hand and ask them to collaborate in the context of the Lifelong Learning CSE project.

Interaction in the context of project work with end users occurs in the mother tongue of the students (this may not be English). All reporting, visualisation and communication between peers however is done in English.

Also staff of the engineering faculty that combines research for the broad welfare sector with a teaching assignment proved to have a good profile to move the CSE curriculum forward.

In case exchange students take part in the project work, these students are be put in tandem with a local student that masters the mother tongue of the end user. This team work has proven to be very rewarding in both directions. The exchange student can perfectly compare with his home context and broaden the perspective of the local student. Close interaction with the local student contributes to the integration of the exchange student in the host country.

In the project we also counted a few professors who are personally related to a so-called vulnerable relative. These professors proved to have an intrinsic motivation to develop and help sustain this new profile for engineers partly based upon their own needs and interests. Two project members even incorporated two fields in ‘one person’ having both an engineering degree as well as a social work degree. Next to having an interest both in the engineering profile as well as in the social domain, networking skills and having connections to identify real life project ideas proved to be crucial characteristics of the staff members involved. Teachers indeed have a role to relate students to the right peers and other stakeholders both in and outside HEI’s, on a local and international level. This networking is also important to improve the project results and maximise the valorisation potential. V.

COLLABORATION ON THE LEVEL OF STUDENTS

Project based coursework is seen in the CSE curriculum as an opportunity to undertake a challenge for the public and in the context students choose for themselves (out of the variety of audiences and organisations in the social domain). For the project based coursework it is important that the theories of human/user centred design are put into practice. Students are guided in this process via the design thinking template (cf. building block two). Project based coursework provides depth in the field of Community Service Engineering.

Undertaking the projects asks for an approach in which students integrate and apply the knowledge, insights and attitudes they acquire inter alia through the taught programme (cf. building blocks three and four). The taught programme provides breadth in the field of Community Service Engineering. Students can become acquainted with the variety of audiences and organisations in the domain. Students can learn from experts and are provided with material (need and nice to know) to enhance their knowledge. Interaction and individual assignments (including feedback) are mainly organised on a virtual basis. For the virtually organised part of the curriculum, students are asked to engage in and are offered a variety of online learning activities and tools. They are asked to watch web lectures and existing video material individually. They are asked to exchange idea/reflections using blogs, wiki’s, mindmaps, shared document creation, image creation or editing tools,… for group collaboration. To make students aware of the possibilities “A Framework for Web 2.0 Learning Design”[8] is made available as reading material on Feedback Fruits, where they can find a lot of tools to choose from.

Students are stimulated to learn about the context. They are stimulated to go into dialogue with the end user for the technology. Maybe they find existing technology in the market that can be built upon. Besides having to take into account usability issues, which demands interdisciplinary skills in itself, students have to think about environmental, economical, ethical, … implications.

Real-life project work is key in the curriculum of Community Service Engineering. Learning activities take place on a national as well as on an international level. In this context there is a challenging role for teachers.

To find new perspectives, insights and feedback the design thinking template invites the students to initiate a national and international meeting with peers in order to discuss his/her real life challenge and possible solutions. Some students took the initiative for such a meeting spontaneously, but teachers have

The project’s database is the starting point. Teachers yearly prompt their local network to detect new project ideas for students and update the database with these new ideas. Whenever a student picks up an idea from the database the teacher changes the status from vacant into planned.

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VI.

THE ROLE OF THE TEACHER/COORDINATOR OF THE CSE TRACK WITHIN THE HEI

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Next the administrative documents need to be completed. In many cases official project documents such as an internship agreements and insurance documents need to be signed between the student, the HEI and the organisation that initiated the project idea. In case the student initiated the project idea him/herself the third party is the university acting as ‘employer’. The project work is unpaid but the organisation is free to give a reimbursement of expenses. If students need to use or purchase specific materials or machines, it is expected these facilities are being provided or expenses are being reimbursed by the organisation. In many HEI’s students have access to a fab lab (fabrication laboratory) or comparable workplaces to produce their prototypes. Before students get started on the challenge they are assigned a coach from the HEI and a mentor from the organisation that initiated the idea. In case the student initiated the project idea himself the teacher/coordinator appoints a knowledgeable mentor from the field of work. Students are invited to reformulate the initial idea into a project launch document and a first action plan and discuss this with their promoter and mentor. To ensure a correct and smooth progress of the project, the supervisors will monitor the evolution with the design thinking template as a blueprint for the process. Coach and mentor regularly sit together with the student on his initiative. They will contact each other when necessary. Once a student has started working on a project the CSE teacher/coordinator changes the status of the database to ongoing. From that moment onwards the teacher has the clear role to connect the student with stakeholders and peers and stimulate him/her to interact in order to improve the project’s results. In regard to the role a teacher/professor plays in the process for the project work the coaching tool that KU Leuven has developed in a research project has proven to be very useful. Partners add the characteristics of their project based coursework to a web application and the tool provides the coach with an optimal coaching method and accompanying guidelines and tips. For the summative assessment both the (technical) end result of the project is important as well as the narrative that tells about the way the project was undertaken (process). Upon the summative assessment students get a ‘pass or fail’ as a final score. It is the role of the teacher/coordinator to fix a date and timing for the defense and to invite a jury to evaluate the student. The jury minimally consists of three persons: the coach, the mentor and a third person. Criteria for evaluation are provided to the members of the jury. The CSE teacher/coordinator gathers the results (presentations) and adds them as URL to the project's database and gives them the status finished. Next to coaching individual student’s projects, it is important the teacher has an eye for the bigger CSE picture. Teachers continuously learn from and communicate with CSE stakeholders. They set up yearly local meetings to evaluate the CSE track in one’s own country. They contribute to crossfertilisation between projects (comparable challenges, comparable target groups that can be learnt from) and between countries.They contribute to the role of the Higher Education

Institutions as international hubs in Community Service Engineering Innovation Networks. If possible, they connect to other disciplines at the level of their own institution and try to involve students from other departments (e.g. social work, psychology,...). This is particularly interesting if, at institutional level there is a strategic choice to focus research and development to certain areas. If one of these areas is suitable for the contributions from Community Service Engineering, there is a potential to set up multi-disciplinary projects creating more critical mass around a particular theme. This creates more sustainable impact and at the same time, it makes sustainability more likely. The project work is underpinned with a taught programme. The minimal version of this taught programme is the short online track. This short online track triggers students to look at the bigger CSE picture, beyond their individual project for the social domain. Via the taught programme they gain knowledge, insights and attitudes to be integrated in and applied to the project work. Assignments in bits and pieces ask the students to apply the theory to the challenge they are working on. Next to being aware of the design thinking template (as a coach), the CSE teacher/coordinator masters the content of the short online track and gives online feedback to assignments. The HEI’s can also decide to extend the taught programme with other learning activities and related assignments. Additional resources are shared on Feedback Fruits. Depending on the topic testimonials, guest lectures, field visits, interdisciplinary, international or other relevant learning activities can be organised. A reference for the consortium are the three modules the CSE curriculum is divided into and the related learning outcomes based upon the CDIO framework (1. User Centred Design & Vulnerable Groups, 2. Organisations in the social domain, 3. Technology in the social domain). It is the CSE teacher/coordinator who looks for opportunities within his/her own HEI to extend the short online CSE track. On a yearly basis the consortium organises joint webinars (virtual mobility) for its students on recent and relevant CSE topics. These webinars can also be considered as an extension to the short online track. They are however an effort of the entire consortium and not of one individual HEI that shares its resources on Feedback Fruits. The CSE teacher/coordinator also has the role to integrate the CSE online track (and extensions) into the virtual learning platform the HEI uses. He/she also updates the material in the various spaces on Feedback Fruits and attracts students to the joint online webinars the consortium organises. VII. PLANS FOR THE FUTURE All participating HEI in the LLP project acknowledge there is a role for engineers in the social domain. During the course of the project they have connected with partners in the workfield (organisations, companies, research groups,…) and have established structural collaborations for the project based coursework. All partners agree that the project based coursework should be underpinned with a taught programme, minimally the short

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online track. This track allows students to develop human/user centered design skills, gain empathy for vulnerable groups and learn about organisations in the social domain in order to develop apt technological end results that can sustain in the market. This was a gap in the educational structure for engineers before. All partners organise the CSE track in English and embed it in a European and global network. Engaging engineering students in projects for the social domain with English as the working language has proven to be fruitful for international collaboration during the project'sprojects lifetime. There has been: o

Student exchange (physical and virtual)

o

Staff exchange

o

An online debate across country borders, discussing the pros and cons of inventions or implementations of technology for the social domain that were taken from the local newspapers in the four countries

o

An international Engineering4Society conference with various examples of technology for the social domain, adapted educational curricula, methods of teaching and/or practicing human/user centred design in engineering,…

o

A series of joint online webinars on the topics of living with a disability, ageing and informal care

The first plan for the future is to maintain what has been started within each institution and keep up the international collaboration. Only then CSE can build capacity to find innovative solutions that can be applied in a wider range of social organisations and can detect market potential for businesses across Europe and beyond (niche markets). Companies offering technology for the social domain are often operating in niche markets and need a European and/or global scope to find enough market potential. Student’s projects in particular and CSE in general make a bridge to find the needed market, thereby acting as open innovation hub for societal innovation and transformation. The short online track is presented on Udemy. There is open access to the course for engineers worldwide. As such the short online track is offered to a wide public. Valuable feedback and insights will be gained from this broad audience. Partners will also call upon their international networks and invite other HEI to join the consortium as ally partners. Ally partners are higher education institutions which find interest in the four building blocks of the CSE curriculum and find ways to integrate it in their project based coursework or other parts of their engineering curricula in a similar way the LLP partners did. As such the consortium can be expanded. This idea has been taken from the IEREST project[9] that also worked with ally partners and expanded the partnership after the project’s lifespan in a successful way.

at all levels. Project based approaches have been widely used at Computer-Aided design (CAD) department for teaching software engineers. The main feature of the approach is the use of digital game-based learning (DGBL) technologies for teaching students at all educational levels. CAD department has also the international experience in project based education. Bachelor and master students during several years took part in the Multinational Undergraduate Team Work (MUTW) project (http://mutw.praxisnetwork.eu/) aiming to students collaboration in an international setting and join and expand their skills towards a common realization of software projects. VSTU will bring his experience to the development of project based courses. On the other hand, integration of the educational model suggested by four partner countries to the curricula will help the CAD Department to improve the project-based educational process and thus to enhance the quality of training. Contacts have been made with the management of the European Project Semester (EPS). This is a programme offered by 16 European universities in 12 countries throughout Europe to students who have completed at least two years of study. The CSE consortium sees a lot potential synergy with EPS since it also has project work in the core, is designed with engineering students in mind but open to other disciplines. CONCLUSION & DISCUSSION

Society is changing into a network society and the role that HEI’s play changes along from an independent knowledge generator occupied with knowledge transfer to a solution generator occupied with knowledge sharing and guiding societal transfer processes. CSE has created four building blocks that facilitate to coach students in their project work and help them to acquire the necessary knowledge, insights and attitudes while designing technology for the social domain. At the same time the four building blocks allow to tap into an international network to gain a broader perspective and maximise the valorisation potential of the project end results. At the same time this international collaboration helps to acquire intercultural competences. The ultimate goal of the consortium is to train not only technically excellent but also well-rounded and socially aware engineers. The CSE track is offered to students in different ways in the participating HEI’s. It was an explicit choice to build a dynamic CSE curriculum that has common topics, joint learning outcomes and a shared approach for project work at the basis. The initial consortium is open to welcome ally partners. These might be attracted to the CSE track for their engineering students. The track fills a gap in the educational structure for engineers wanting to work for the social domain and beyond. The curriculum and collaboration between partners is dynamic and in constant evolution. Furthermore it allows HEI’s to play their role as open innovation hub for societal innovation and transformation.

Volgograd State Technical University (VSTU) is one those partners who is supposed to actively collaborate in the project

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