Abstract:

Since 2002 University West, Sweden has had a mission from the Swedish government to develop methods for work integrated learning (WIL). WIL is thus a “trademark” of the university and the university is continuously developing teaching models to enhance a synergy between theory and practice with the goal to improve education and students’ lifelong learning. A challenge in such work is a decreasing engagement among students to participate in seminars at campus, especially during periods of internship. In the study underlying this paper we therefore explore a new teaching and learning method that aims to stimulate students to come to campus and to discuss their experiences with peer students and teachers during their internship.

The internship and the seminars are organized as a ‘WIL course’ in the fifth semester of the candidate program ‘Digital Media’. As part of the course the students spend four days a week in a workplace where they contribute substantially to the work at the workplace. One day a week they spend at campus to reflect, write and discuss topics related to the work and organization at the workplace e.g. organizational culture, how a work day is organized, how design work is organized, and how the workplace treats its customers. The students and teachers meet once every second week for a seminar where they discuss the above-mentioned themes. The reflections made at the seminars and the conversations are important for the learning goals at the course. However, the teachers experience a moderate interest from the students’ side to participate and the students tend to be ill prepared.

To increase the value and learning for the students, a new approach for better structure and engagement has been introduced, where students in beforehand writtenly reflect on questions about their workplace in relation to the theme of the week. They write in open and shared documents so that all students before the seminare can take part of each others reflections and as such come to the seminar with a wider perspective on the particular theme. The seminar is then held at the campus where the themes are discussed and workplaces compared with help of a shared matrix where the students can place their workplace regarding level of structure, formality, creativity etc . As such the seminar has a ‘flipped’ character and the ICT tools for learning used are open and editable over time for all participants.

The empirical material is based on 24 hours participant observations, 10 students’ written reflections and the course curricula. The findings show that the flipped and open approach to the seminars has made the students more engaged in reflections about their workplace, not only during the seminar at campus but also during their work at the workplace. The shared document stimulates reflections of differences between workplaces that has not been so clear before, and the matrix has helped the students to take the reflections to a higher level by reflecting over organizational culture and workplace conditions. By comparing each other’s experiences from a spectrum of different aspects/themes they get a more nuanced picture of the skills and competences needed in the workplace, and they get more strengthened in their professional role. The recurrent discussions over time during the course therefore contribute to make the students more experienced than they would had been by only having got the experience from their own workplace.

Keywords:

Flipped seminar, open seminar, higher education, work integrated learning, shared experience, students.