Abstract:

In the contemporary digitalisation in the Western world, the reinforcement of professional development and organisational upskilling in a business is essential. The shift to a knowledge society requires technology enhanced and work-integrated professional development aimed at developing the staff’s domain-specific knowledge as well as profession-based digital competence. With this short backdrop, the aim of this paper is to describe and discuss how academia collaborated with companies and organisations in the Swedish BUFFL-project. This was a two-year collaborative project for professional development for insurance and bank company staff and a specific focus on organisational development. The project was carried out as a cross-disciplinary collaboration between researchers from different departments in three universities and six companies. The overall research question to answer was: "What are the course participants' attitudes towards technology enhanced, and work-integrated professional development involving 'Bringing Your Own Data' (BOYD)?". The BYOD approach was part of a course design rule in the BUFFL-project meaning that all course modules should include at least one assignment related to the course literature, and one assignment based on the involved companies' own brought data. This study used a mixed method approach combining a descriptive statistical analysis of Likert-questions with an inductive thematic analysis of free-text answers. The analysed data was extracted from evaluation questionnaires for 14 course modules in the BUFFL-project. Results have been grouped into categories built around themes with a potential to answer the overall research question. Preliminary findings indicate that the pedagogical model used in the BUFFL-project had minor technical issues that have disturbed the teaching and learning activities, and that the model most likely needed further refinement. However, participants seemed to portray a general positive attitude towards the BUFFL model for technology enhanced professional development. Finally, the concept of Bringing Your Own Data appears to have the potential to reinforce work-integrated learning.

Keywords:

Work-integrated learning, WIL, Professional development, Technology enhanced learning, Bring your own data, Academy meets the industry.