Abstract:

The necessity for engineers to stay updated on current technology trends, new technological breakthroughs, and the latest tools is obvious, as is the skill to disseminate new insights to colleagues and peers. Today, there is also a significant amount of material available on the Internet, including guides, tutorials, and online courses. Based on this need, we have developed a new type of course that we offer just before the final thesis project, where our students can set up their own in-depth learning projects and taking their first steps towards lifelong learning. For materials, they can freely choose anything they find appropriate, as long as they can justify their choice well. However, students often choose various MOOC courses as the basis for their projects. The course is student-centered and fully adapted to a flipped classroom model, with minimal teaching effort, focusing on students learning from each other in various seminars. The result has been a course highly appreciated by students, which has created electiveness and depth with minimal teaching efforts, as well as maturity in preparation for their upcoming independent work and their professional roles. And finally, hopefully a good start to their lifelong learning as professionals.

In this work, we will present the course setup we have run over the past 4 years for our engineering students. Including the courses details and how we have actively developed the course. Hence, in this work we have investigated the following two research questions:
1) How can we teach our engineering students to initiate lifelong learning?
2) How can we create valuable electives with little teaching effort towards the end of our engineering program?

Our course is in the form of a self-study where students themselves set up their own learning project, focus, learning objectives, theoretical tasks, and practical tasks. The results have been very successful, and the students have shown a deep understanding of learning on their own, how to learn, how they can communicate what they have learned to their colleagues in various good ways, and enabled electiveness if it is something they feel was missing in their engineering education or if it is something they want to delve deeper into. As well as an acceleration towards their thesis work and the opportunity to study a little extra beforehand, in the specific subject that their future thesis work will address. We have run the course for 4 semesters now for a total of 44 students and the students have gone through about 40 different courses and books. Resulting in a very appreciated course and good grades in our evaluations, as well as student throughput as high as 93%.

Our primary conclusions are that we have succeeded well in teaching students to learn on their own and thus start lifelong learning as professionals. And that we have shown that we can with small means and teacher time create good depth and valuable electiveness for our students. Our future work lies in refining and clarifying the demands on their work to reach different grades, and work with adjusting the examination form to not rely as much on the report itself in grading. Hence, we are optimistic about the future of this course and since the students themselves choose their areas, the course keeps itself updated on future trends and we teachers only need to follow along on the journey.

Keywords:

Lifelong learning, MOOC, Flipped classroom.