Conference Agenda

At Linköping university, a model to facilitate impact and bridge the gap between research, education, and business creation, has been developed. It is named “ComICIR”, which stands for Commercialization of Innovative Challenges from Industry and Research. The model allows researchers, firms, and students to work in a co-creation process that are built on the following five steps: (1) research validation, (2) idea generation, (3) idea validation, (4) idea evaluation and, (5) innovation strategy. In the paper, we describe the model and analyse how challenges and ideas could be developed and experientially based pedagogical approaches could be adjusted in order to benefit the regional ecosystem of research, education and industry and contribute to reaching increased impact of innovative ideas and ventures. Our main finding is that CBL is beneficial but requires close cooperation between teachers and innovation support actors. Flexibility is needed to fit the purpose of the course as well as the needs of the challenge providers. Hence, challenges need to be categorized and qualified to take into account the aim and scope of the challenge as well as its degree of development as this affects how the challenges should be written and treated to get the best outcome.

Industry 4.0 had a strong impact on globalization by changing the workforce and increasing access to new skills and knowledge. According to the World Economic Forum by 2025, 50% of all employees will need reskilling due to adopting new technology. Industry 5.0 addresses long term prospects such as sustainability, resilience and human-centricity regarding efficiency and productivity. Agriculture is the most exposed economic sector to climate change with cascade effects on agro ecosystems. Innovations in the agricultural sector are inevitable to ensure food security and social and environmental sustainability.

This paper presents Erasmus+ projects that highlight the importance of future engineering education in the agricultural sector considering change drivers and challenges (e.g., climate change, labour market needs, digitalization, pedagogical approaches, micro-credentials). The goal is to provide holistic competence-based education that helps learners develop sustainability skills for responsible action. Therefore, we combine the innovative pedagogic approaches with substantial content, to allow up/reskilling in a short period of time. We consider opportunities and limitations and how comprehensive engineering courses must be designed to be effective. We present(compare) innovative learning approaches in the realm of agricultural engineering and evaluate the efficiency of short courses (6 ECTS), micro credentials.

Analysing the experiences of several courses conducted at different European universities in past years, we can conclude that if the right pedagogic methods are paired with substantial content, up/reskilling is possible in short period of time (6ECTS). Main beneficiaries are farmers, life-long learners, partners of the project, associated partners, and students living in rural areas.

Introduction – How to formulate the goals of an academic educational program in such a way that they reflect the identity of the profession, but at the same time allow the flexibility required for self-responsible and self-directed individual study paths that can initiate lifelong learning and successful interdisciplinary collaboration after graduation? Here, we present a novel competency framework that (1) reflects the identity and academic level of the interdisciplinary Biomedical Engineering (BME) profession, (2) permits the alignment of program intended learning outcomes that accommodate the content of the different specialisation tracks of the BME program and (3) guides students and staff by improved curriculum mapping and optimization. Methods – We collected input from teaching staff members who are actively practicing their BME profession in the interdisciplinary ecosystem around our university. Using their feedback, we iteratively formulated a set of core competencies that characterize the work and role of the BME professional. We obtained preliminary face-validity by performing curriculum mappings from several courses from BME-tracks and by asking feedback from students. Results – The iterations resulted in the FIRIS-P competency framework including five successive core professional competencies of which specified subcompetencies carry the BME identity: (1) Fundamental competencies, (2) Instrumental competencies, (3) Reasoning competencies, (4) Interventional competencies, and (5) Societal competencies. These core professional competencies are completed and supported by transferable Personal competencies. Discussion - Preliminary validation indicates that the FIRIS-P framework carries all three characteristics mentioned above, warranting future evaluation of its merits for education of lifelong learning BME professionals.

A trend in higher education is a stronger focus on the content of a study program as a whole rather than the individual courses that make up the program. The Norwegian university of science and technology (NTNU) has recently completed a large project, The future of technology studies (FTS), that attempt to describe how study programs should prepare students for a technological career in a rapidly evolving society. A central recommendation from the project is the necessity of an integrated, program-driven curriculum. This is especially tru for sustainability. Hence, there is a need for a useful description of the content at the program level. However, a typical description of the learning outcomes of a study program is very brief, often just a set of bullet points that is in no way sufficient to describe the complexity of a study program.

Two study programs in physics and mathematics at NTNU are in the process of revising the study program following the recom- mendations of FTS. We a found that the current framework for documenting the content of the study program is not sufficient. We are proposing a new scheme where the content is documented in a master document. Some new features of the master document that are typically not part of conventional program descriptions are: Specific target audience, not only what but also what not, and why and why not, using a natural language, and maintaining complete revision history.