Abstract:

The competitiveness of economies is increasingly dependent on the availability of a qualified and entrepreneurial workforce. Transversal skills such as the critical thinking, initiative, problem solving, and collaborative work will prepare individuals for today´s varied and unpredictable career paths. Attention also needs to be given to entrepreneurial skills as they not only contribute to new businesses creation but also for the employability of young people. European Higher Education (HE) and training systems continue to fall short in providing these right skills for employability (Rethinking Education, EU, 2012).

HE and Vocational Education Training (VET) Institutions need to keep the efforts to reposition themselves in the emerging learning landscape and to experiment new formats and strategies for learning and teaching to be able to offer relevant, effective, and high quality learning experiences in the future (Redecker, C. et al., 2011). There is a consensus on the need for comprehensive changes to curricula and learning methods and for the inclusion of transversal and transferable skills in the curricula´s that should be “T-shaped” – rooted in the specific academic discipline while at the same time interacting and cooperating with other disciplines/sectors. For the modernisation of the institutions is recognised the need to: promote and nurture an institutional culture to innovation that enhances creativity, stimulates openness and minimises resistance to change; develop and monitor curricula, drawing on new methods of teaching and learning so that students acquire relevant skills for employability; introduce and promote cross/trans and interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and learning.

Design thinking (DT) is a mindset and a holistic concept to design cognition and design learning that enables students to work successfully in multi-disciplinary teams and enact positive, design-led change in the world. DT proved already to be a tool capable of delivering “new skills”, many of the new skills - social intelligence, novel & adaptive thinking, cross cultural competences, transdisciplinarity, design mind-set & virtual collaboration – employers and organizations seek. The need to prepare the present and future workers for an increasingly dynamic society has long been a concern at different political, educational, and organisational levels. This scenario offers an important challenge to the education and training sector. Therefore, a consortium of partners from 6 different countries (Portugal, Spain, Italy, Finland, Belgium, and Poland) is developing an innovative approach to promote a wider use of DT as a transversal tool, in HEI and VET, by developing and making available an innovative digital course supported on mobile learning for education professionals and professional trainers. The work being developed includes also the development of a toolkit on DT applied to education & training; the promotion of the renew of learning approaches and methodologies to fit to the new challenges; and fostering the cooperation between higher education institutions and the labour market, allowing for the development of people better prepared to respond to the challenges of the labour market.

Keywords:

Educational Research Experiences, New challenges for the Higher Education Area, Mobile Learning.