Challenges for Teaching and Learning Activities (TLA) at Engineering Education

Abstract

<p> In the knowledge-based society, the legacy education system does not provide the needed skills for creative engineers. Triple-helix model is a concept that aims to bond universities, industry and government in a bid to create innovations. In Europe, integrating research, education, and innovation together in a comprehensive manner has been the major driving force for local and European university development. The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) , Open Labs and Makerspace are few examples to mention. However, many of the experiences gained on those facilities, are not directly useable and hardly adaptable in a global content and especially in strategic co-operation with universities in fast developing countries. For this purpose, KTH has systematically and broadly developed a new and more comprehensive strategy for co-operation with our strategic partner universities. <br /><br />The new approach consists of three fundamental concepts forming the pillars for activities and actions:<br />• Strong commitment and support for Open Science and related transparency and global co-operation. KTH has been one of the first institutional signers of the recent Dakar Declaration on that. This has facilitated and empowered the recently developed Open Science Platform with the focus on integrating the knowledge triangle and providing Science Gateways.<br />• Introducing a new approach for societal stakeholder integration through the Challenge Driven Education model and Technology Transfer Alliance supporting a comprehensive multi-partner interaction.<br />• Physical co-locating the activities to university initiated co-creation, co-design, and co-drafting centers forming the local Open Labs and Maker Space meeting places and critical infrastructure resources for integrating problem owners to various solution provides especially from academia. <br /><br />With these pillars we have already seen new innovation capacity generated, new excitement and renewal of the academic environments, and above creating broad social and societal impact especially for problems which require multidisciplinary approach for solutions and business creation. From KTH we do this for our own future development and for creating our capacity to think the local problems from the “out-of-the-box” manner.<br />In order to overcome from the new challenges for the Higher Education area at KTH , we have activities which alien the learning any teaching activities with different task group:<br />• Cross-Cultural Faculty Development for Challenge Driven Education <br />• Global learning and digital platform <br />• Open innovation Platform for learning <br />By developing the above factors to the teaching and learning practices, we have developed new curriculums (MSc. and PhD) for our partners to spark innovation and entrepreneurship. The curriculums use TLA model where students interact with Open Lab activities. Our assessments show that the enrolled students have gained creative skills in dealing with engineering problem and consolidate their knowledge to improve the future TLA (Teaching and Learning Activities)<br /></p><p>

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