THE ROLE OF MASTER´S LEVEL STUDENTS – CASE ROBOTS AND FUTURE OF WELFARE SERVICES

The aim of higher education is to produce competences for working life through teaching, research, and development. There is a paucity of research on competence-based curriculum and qualification requirements from this kind working-life perspective on education.

To address the above paucity, this paper describes student´s role and their participating in an ongoing research project, as well as examines the participation and contributions of the students in terms of competence building for research and development, for working life, and learning for and in the future. More specifically, this paper examines how the Master’s level course of “Research, social robots and concept development” served as both as content-provider for the research project and enabled to achieve new competences. The article answers the questions: what kind of roles students have in a research project and how do students participate in a research project in a way that contributes to their competence development?

A literature review on competence development through higher education reveals following domains of competences (Uerz et al, 2018): technology competences (means the ability to use technology in general), competences for pedagogical and educational use of technology, beliefs about teaching and learning, and competences for innovation and professional learning.

In Finland, the legislative core task of UAS (university of applied sciences) is teaching, research and regional development. The Master’s degree program (135 ECTS) includes substance-based studies, research methods studies and a thesis.

The study was qualitative and based on action research and Living lab methodology. The data included survey from health care and social welfare master‘s level students (n=18) participating in the course of digital services and the data from the students (n=8) participating in joint intensive course. The purpose of joint course was that students were planning, implementing and evaluating how to apply especially social robot Pepper responding elderly people´s needs such as loneliness and immobility. Students were studying in master's degree programs: Service Innovation and Design, Security Management and Leadership and Management in Health care and Social Welfare.
The ROSE (Robots and Future of Welfare Services) represent the context for this study. The ROSE adopts a multidisciplinary and holistic approach to study how advances in robot and perception technologies allow product and service innovation and renewal of welfare services developed jointly with users and other stakeholders. Strategic Research Council, Academy of Finland, funds the project. Aalto University is coordinating the project. (www.roseproject.aalto.fi).

The findings of the study include how and why the active participation of the students in the course enabled them engagement and cooperation with various actors in real life situations. The students were able to cooperate authentically in multiprofessional team and learn from each other. Through the participation in team and with the elderly people, students could grasp the meaning of future orientated and user-centered approach to develop working life. Studying in project enhanced multiple competences such as a user-centric and innovative way to develop the contents of elderly care. Students were in an active role and represented more than one role; they were: “developers”, “explorers”, “innovators”, “followers”, and/or “doubters”.