Last week I spent at the yearly SEFI-conference with the theme “Education Excellence for Sustainability”. SEFI is a Europe wide engineering education network where AYY is a member. The main event yearly is the conference where the international affairs responsible has the luck to visit. This year the conference was far away at the Terceira Island in Portugal. I did not have anything to present myself this year, but it only gave me more time to focus on new information and networking with international engineering education developers.
The view from the conference centre
The week was filled with presentations, posters, workshops and keynote speakers. The participants also had the possibility to visit a local powerplant. All these gave an insight in how the whole field differs, but is still surprisingly similar. We have to use the possibilities to learn from each other and not only re-invent. This is especially important with the global world and international movement for education and employment. In addition, Europe is decreasing in size compared to other parts of the world and to keep up the leading position worldwide, the education has to be world leading.
The change in required skills at the job market is rapid.
Local geothermal plant
The most important takeaways of the week was the slow development of higher education compared to the job market and the loss of creativity during the time in school. Combining the two problems, the graduating students acquires knowledge on the subject studied, but not the way of thinking to apply the knowledge in a new scenario. At the same time the job market is changing rapidly and the traditional way of working is not the primary way to get employed. This development has to be started at curriculum level and not only improve the already existing systems. In Australia they had developed a whole degree in co-operation with industry. In this way, the industry gets to co-create with higher education the future employees. This was nicely concluded in a short sentence by the curriculum developers: “I hire a person, not a position”. Other good examples are the Open University in the United Kingdom were the studies are online based with only a few physical attendance. There the labs were done online with actual hardware instead of only simulations to make it feel more real.
During the discussions I realised that Aalto University and its student community is very competitive internationally. For example, Design Factory was mentioned and learned from, our onlinelearning possibilities was an example, the multidisciplinary possibilities are wide and the power of students can only be dreamed of. We have to be proud of what we have achieved and keep them up. However, our University and everything surrounding will never be ready. Do not be afraid to organize even the a bit crazy ideas!
Parts of the Finnish and Danish delegations enjoying great local food