Cooperation is a multi-faceted concept in higher education. It could denote the cooperation between industry and academia, enabling students to train problem solving in a real life context. It could also describe the internationalisation efforts found in teachers’ and students’ exchange programmes. Moreover, cooperation exists between disciplines in order to enable a holistic perspective on course contents. This paper describes some courses where all these aspects of cooperation are utilised for reaching the best possible conditions for teaching mechanical engineering.
This paper is dealing with experiences of teaching courses within Machine Design, Product Development, Industrial Information Systems, and Degree Project, which are taught in English and contain projects in cooperation with industries. These courses are dealing with different approaches to the industrial projects to give the students an overall view and understanding of the real engineering work.
The practical work is in form of student driven industrial projects, where students from the Mechanical Engineering Department at Linnaeus University collaborate with international students. The industrial related projects results in valuable real life experiences. The background of students from different countries and experiences of international teachers enriches the teaching process and students’ teamwork activities. Another result is the valuable culture exchange between the students and teachers which gives skills for future engineers to work in the European or global labour market.
The implementation of the courses are described with focus on how cooperation between industry and academia, as well as between different competences at Linnaeus University and the University of Rousse, Bulgaria are utilised for creating optimal learning conditions.
Proceedings of the 10th International CDIO Conference, Barcelona, Spain, June 15-19 2014