Abstract:

Most of the teaching staff at the universities around the world are products of the academic world. It means that the most of the professors, doctors, lectures etc. who are teaching at the engineering courses and programs, have no experiences from the industry or places that have pure engineering work. Most of these teaching staff has studied their bachelor, master, and doctorate studies at one or a number of universities, and then continued their working career with research and teaching in academia, and does not have any experiences from the engineering real life. Lack of experiences from working at the industries, for engineering teaching staff, does affect the teaching and knowledge transfer to the students in a negative way, and it increases the gap between the academia and the industry.

There must be a bridge between the university studies and the industry work already in the beginning of the engineering programs, to prepare the students to enter their engineering work career in a smooth way. Otherwise, there will be shock for the fresh engineers and they will face difficulties in the beginning of their introduction to the labor market. Therefore, a cooperation between the engineering university education and the industry in the same field is very important already from the beginning of the first semester of studies.

This article is dealing with the mechanical engineering program at Linnaeus University and the mechanical engineering industry in southern Sweden. All the types of cooperation from the study tours to the degree projects accomplished at the industries will be systematically presented and the results will be discussed from faculty and industry perspective.

Keywords:

Collaborative learning, higher learning, university-industry cooperation.