Abstract:

Team learning and team entrepreneurship study path (TLE) has been employed at a Finnish Higher education institute (HEI), for almost fifteen years. In this article, a fifteen-year anniversary overview to team learning and team entrepreneurship study path and its future objectives will be carried out. The current state of the art will be analyzed from pedagogical viewpoint and adaptation to new disruptive technologies such as large language models (LLM’s) and other AI -related tools.

At the HEI, LAB University of Applied Sciences, students who choose the TLE study first year conventional way. During first year, they establish a cooperative which they 100 % own by themselves, and run it for next 2-2,5 years. They will be coached – individual, team, and professional development – by an experienced team coached nominated for the team by the HEI. Students, called team entrepreneurs, employ projects for real customers who pay them real money, study professional books, and participate into trainings with team coach. There are different types of trainings, dialogues based on books read, ideation for new project, reflection of the past projects or specialist introductions to specific contents. Every now and a 12 or 24 innovation assignment will be carried out. In innovation assignment there is real customer with the demanding challenge and limited time to produce ideas, concepts, or solutions into it. The innovation assignments measure individual, team, and professional development of the team members. After the innovation assignments a careful reflection of the team’s current situation is carried out.

The author was involved in the creation of the TLE between 2009 – 2018 and has been away from the operative of the TLE for over five years. This study tries to dive again into TLE, its leading thoughts, learning philosophy of team coaches, and how different application are utilized at the TLE study path. Hopefully the study will also offer fresh viewpoints and possibilities to recognize development and possible deficits of the current arrangements.

A preliminary research question for this study will be: How operators in TLE see the current stage of their actions as part of the HEI, and what might be possible future paths of the TLE?

The data for the study will consist of:
- Theme-based interviews (4-8) of team coaches and other operators of TLE
- Documents analysis, public documents of TLE
- Participant observation of tryouts (one of the learning methods of TLE)

The data will be analyzed following the principles of grounded theory method (open, axial, and selective coding), and a descriptive case study will be written based on the data. The results will show how the TLE has been able to adapt possibilities offered by rapid changes in available technologies and at the same time how fundamental thoughts of offering learner centric learning environment and pedagogics with face-to-face dialogue in small group and team level.

In later phase, in would be fruitful to expand data collection also to team entrepreneurs with survey and theme-based interviews, but at this stage it will not yet be done. Another possible future study would be to compere similar TLE’s in Finnish context or even more broadly to spread best practices and solve challenges together.

Keywords:

Higher education institute, learner centric pedagogics, team learning and team entrepreneurship, qualitative research.