Abstract:

AI Competence for Sweden, funded by the Swedish government, was launched in 2018 and engaged seven universities with established AI track-record to build a national platform for professional education in AI, both for the private and public sectors. The project has provided opportunities for the universities to work together on this important topic, which has resulted in both new education and many lessons learned.

This paper outlines the key lessons after three years and, based on these, proposes recommendations for the future. The intention is to share our collective insights to serve as an inspiration for future initiatives both within Sweden and internationally.

Major Achievements:
- Established a platform for cooperation between the seven Swedish universities.
- Developed and delivered short courses for working professionals in varying formats.
- Established a web portal and catalogue of courses.
- Offered the possibility to promote existing courses on the web portal.
- Provided economic support and funding to facilitate the universities interaction with companies.
- Demonstrated to the the business community a collective effort of universities to offer life-long learning.

Lessons Learned:
- The need to clarify the role of higher education institutions in professional education and life-long learning
- The challenge of coordination with other publicly funded initiatives
- The importance of adapted learning formats
- Matching course contents with participants' needs
- Quality assurance and agile course development
- Challenges for adult learning in AI
- Deployment and integration of new AI competencies in the home organization
- Lack of long-term funding has prevented resource allocation and promotion of the initiative
- Training as a professional service or a free utility provided by the state

Recommendations:
- Integrate life-long learning in the everyday activities of universities through explicit mission and funding
- Extend the initiative to cover all universities
- Systematic promotion and increase visibility of web portal
- Establish a reference group with representatives from private and public sectors to better capture their situation and needs
- Better coordination of different initiatives and pooling of resources to achieve economies of scale
- Continuous evaluation and quality assurance of courses and activities to improve educational offerings
- Increase international initiatives, especially on the EU level

AI Competence has been a very successful initiative that has established the basis for long-term collaboration between many Swedish universities in the area of life-long learning. The 4M EUR investment from the government was instrumental in achieving this. The next major step is to integrate the activities in the normal everyday work of the universities. It is paramount that we expand and sustain the life-long learning activities within the universities, rather than building new parallel systems. This is best done by significantly increasing the general funding for education and broadening the assignment to the universities to explicitly include life-long learning.

The success of our society depends to a large degree on how well we manage to continuously educate our citizens to keep up with the technological developments. AI Competence of Sweden is a good example of how a country can ramp up its efforts and establish national collaboration and an effective organization for large scale continuous education.

Keywords:

AI, professional education, life-long learning, university collaboration, higher education.