Abstract:

Society and the labour markets have in many ways been undergoing huge changes during past decades. This has been explained as being a change from the industrial society to the information society, the knowledge society, and even to the learning economy and society. The changes have had an impact on jobs, work functions and company structures, as well as on industrial dynamics. However, they have also had an important impact on everyday social life and on the changing aspects of the economy and society. These tendencies influence the requirements for professional and personal competencies of new professionals. Developments in society and economy require educational systems to support young people in acquiring the skills and competencies that allow them to benefit from emerging new forms of socialisation and to contribute actively to economic development in a system where the main asset is knowledge.

This context requires higher education institutions (HEIs) to consider transformational pedagogical strategies. Over the last five to ten years, it has been witnessed a rise in student-staff collaborative research and practice in higher education. There is also growing evidence of many positive outcomes from partnership and co-creation in learning and teaching, including enhanced engagement, motivation, meta-cognitive understanding, and identity formation. Bovill (2013) highlights how the idea of students being active partners in learning ‘has gained increasing favour in higher education’. For example, research has explored issues such as students as co-producers, the role of new technologies in engaging learners in knowledge creation, as well as the nature of staff–student partnerships.

We propose to introduce co-creation as learning methodology in the framework of an Erasmus+ project called Co-Care (https://co-care.eu/) with the aim to improve communication skills, interpersonal skills, problem-solving skills, team-work skills, creative thinking skills and critical thinking. The training course was an innovation not only for using co-creation as a learning methodology, but to have in the classroom students from various health disciplines (physiotherapy, nursing, human nutrition and dietetics and occupational therapy), as well as from the field of technology (biomedical engineering and mechatronic engineering) and also from family caregivers of people with Alzheimer's. The teaching team consisted of academics, caregivers, health professionals, and companies in the technology and health sector who participated in the development of the content and in the evaluation of the product developed by the students. In this presentation the experience of the design, implementation, evaluation and sustainability of this training will be explained.

Keywords:

Co-creation, soft skills, student-centered learning.