DESIGNING A NEW INDUSTRY-RELATED SPECIALIZATION IN ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS DESIGN

Preparing students for real-life challenges is one of the crucial goals of engineering education. Nevertheless, gaining practical, industrial experience takes time and effort that usually lays beyond the classical curricular activities. This paper describes our approach, which promotes cooperation between academia and industrial partners to the benefit of both. Although the case described has been implemented while developing a new specialization at the master study program of Electronic Systems Design at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the applied methods can be implemented in other programs. The key concept is to provide students with industrial projects to work on for the whole 2-year study period. The course portfolio is then individually chosen by every student to the benefit of project execution, which results in tailored skill profiles unique for every student matching the competence profiles sought by our industrial partners. Our partners have an active, formative role in the process of course choice and function as industrial supervisors of project work, thus the students effectively have access to both industrial and academic supervision. Gaining practical experience early during the project activities likely ensures a deeper understanding of the project-related challenges during the next semesters, resulting in a higher quality of the final delivery – the master thesis. After finishing the two-year practical project work, our students become more qualified for further cooperation with the partner company. To evaluate our approach, we have performed a student survey as well as collected feedback from our industrial partners. The results of the evaluation are presented and analyzed. Necessary adjustments to the implementation of the proposed scheme due to the COVID-19 outbreak are also addressed. Finally, the paper presents links to digital resources that provide more detailed information about the organization of the specialization that can be reused in similar cases.