Abstract:

BISI is an acronym for Building Interfaces for Social Inclusion. The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between two educations – an IT education and a social education from two different universities in Odense, Denmark. Students from these two universities collaborate through a semester on developing and testing welfare technology which will help children with special needs become included in society.

The two bachelor programs in respectively E-concept Development at Lillebaelt Academy of Professional Higher Education (EAL) and Social Educator at University College Lillebaelt (UCL) have been working together for four years – in close collaboration with both users of welfare technology and the welfare technology industry. Two municipal institutions for children with special needs present issues that hinder inclusion. The solutions for these issues are then developed by the students and presented to industry partners as possible innovative products for further development.

The paper written for ICERI will present research based evidence of the challenges of this interdisciplinary project – particularly focusing on answering the headline’s question. For the industry partners the benefit of the partnership should be the innovative ideas and prototypes developed by the students – which might be turned into future products. Also already existing products can be tried out in new environments by the students, thus opening up potential new markets. But are the solutions close enough to the industry’s zone of own proximal development to be truly interesting? Can the product ideas answer the right questions – the ones industry is facing from their own point of view?

The benefits of the partnership are much clearer for the universities: It creates a unique learning environment where students becomes acutely aware of own professional competences through collaborating with students of a different professional background, because they are developing products for real users – and having them evaluated by industry partners.
The challenges of an interdisciplinary collaboration between two universities have been to bring the project from being an extracurricular incident to an integrated part of the ‘regular’ curriculum of the two participating educations. But to some extent this process has overshadowed the challenges for the ‘real world’ partners – users and producers.

It is very challenging for the day to day life in the municipal institutions for children with special needs to fit in the curricular activities at the universities. How do you find room to accommodate students visiting and/or testing their prototypes in a busy schedule without disrupting it? There are ethical as well as practical issues involved in this.

How can you involve industry partners in curricular activities in a way that qualifies the product and answer industry issues – and not only relies on the industry’s sense of duty and promised social commitment?

A research based approach through surveys and reflective interviews to answering these questions will be presented at the conference. A method for involving industry will be part of the presentation.

Keywords:

Welfare technology, interdisciplinary collaboration, professional competence, industry needs, users involvement.