Abstract:

Businesses are facing operation environments with uncertainty, volatility and complexity. Factors like the 4th industrial revolution and COVID-19 pandemic are pushing all organizations to find new avenues of operation. Creativity is required on all levels of organizations as successful company leaders are urging to make their organizations capable of using the complexity to their business advantage. At the same time, individual employees working in the different sectors will need to navigate in this rapidly shifting landscape.

Higher Education Institutes (HEI’s) are playing a role in helping the businesses to develop via educating the future industry experts. Traditionally educational institutions and structure of curricula are result of technology infrastructure and circumstances of the past. Past pedagogical models are now challenged to cope with current working life needs. This means e.g. placing emphasis from learning theories to developing skills, such as critical thinking, including experiential learning that strengthens soft skills. Also integrating interdisciplinary training will allow having not just a deep understanding of at least one field, but also having the capacity to think in a broader range of disciplines.

The article presents two proven university curricula from Scandinavia that both have their ways to enhance the learning of students via working-life orientation. The experimental development ecosystem (EDE) in LAB University of Applied Sciences, Finland and Work-Integrated learning (WIL) in University West, Sweden. The idea of WIL is the belief in the potential added value of integrating theoretical academic studies with applications of said theories in professional field where students enter into their future areas of profession. The WIL aims at increasing the employability of graduates as they are able to integrate theoretical and academic studies with work-experiences in their respective educational fields. Existing infrastructure for learning is analyzed, it is seen how it can be supported by information technology, and developments for future implications on design are done based on that.

An active University campus in south-eastern Finland, has attracted a group of startups as well as SME’s to collaboration. The collaboration of campus’ researchers and students has formed the learning environment to a novel education approach - an experimental development ecosystem (EDE). In the EDE, learning knowledge, business skills and character are combined as business administration marketing study programme’s students study the most part of their curricula as team entrepreneurs. The students form a co-operative and their studies consist of studying theory as well as carrying out customer projects in their co-operative. The pedagogical model of the EDE is based on experiential learning, action learning and methods enabling new knowledge creation.

In modern times education is no more about transferring theoretical information to students, but preparing them to be able to form a holistic picture of pieces of information from different sources. It is more and more important to be prepared to and handle change that way being able to renew and invent new ideas in the changed situation. In both the above mentioned models, students gain understanding of cross-industrial business ecosystems, and learn skills that help them to truly stand out in the complex world.

Keywords:

Experiental development ecosystem, EDE, Work-Integrated learning, WIL, experiental learning.