INNOVATING HIGHER EDUCATION AND FACULTY COMPETENCES BY PERFORMING PRACTICE BASED RESEARCH

Background:
Curricula in higher education are undergoing constant innovation to match the competences that students learn with the needs of companies and organizations that are their future employers. In order to provide students with the right education, the faculty of educational institutes is challenged to continuously assess the market for young professionals and their desired competences and to develop their own competences and skills accordingly. For many educational organizations, this is an increasingly challenging task as jobs for which they are educating change rapidly.

Main question:
How to innovate educational programs and develop faculty competences to ensure an optimal match between education and future jobs?

Approach of HZ University Of Applied Sciences:
In order to develop faculty competences and innovate curricula, HZ University of Applied Sciences (HZ UAS) started to develop research groups around 2003. These research groups consist of lecturers, professional researchers and external professionals from businesses. They perform practice based research aimed at solving problems that the university’s market partners face in the fields of water, energy and vitality. Over the years, the distinction between lecturers and researchers has disappeared and the university refers to their faculty as lecturer-researchers. These lecturer-researchers involve students in their research and make sure the work is handed over from one student to the other as semesters pass. The research problems are a central topic in the curricula and the goal is to stay at the front of innovations in the market by participating in them. By doing so, the faculty is constantly developing their own competences while bringing the challenges that companies and organizations face into the classrooms. Students learn to cooperate and communicate with students from other programs or universities, lecturers, researchers and external professionals and build their own network as they study. This improves their employability and ability to find jobs that match their interests.

Over the past 10 years, HZ University of Applied Sciences has seen this approach of using research groups to get practice based learning into the curricula and at the same time develop faculty competences lead to higher employee satisfaction, higher student satisfaction and higher work field satisfaction.

Conclusions:
For HZ University of applied sciences, education and research go hand in hand. By setting up research groups that work on focus area’s for the university, teams have been able to transform from a teaching staff into a faculty of lecturer-researchers. This enables our faculty to develop their own competences by doing practice based research with companies, organizations, government and other educational institutes. The research groups have also brought real life problems into the curricula thereby innovating the educational program constantly. This valorization of knowledge developed by doing practise based research into the curricula is the primary goal of the research groups. The research groups have strengthened relationships with partners and are the universities eyes and ears in the field of innovations.