Educational and Entrepreneurial Cooperation in Future City (Nordplus)

Background and goals

Background
Due to the constantly changing situation in business-environment the needs and expectations in labor market are changing very quickly. The challenge for educational institutions is to adapt instantly with the current trends and understand “what happens in the world”.
The difference between what has been taught in higher educational institutions and what kind of skills employers actually need, has been growing over time and caused the situation where enterprises are lacking skillful workforce. In relation to this we all have different starting points when it comes to our specific contexts in the Nordics and the Baltics! Networking can help us all streamline the education and what is taught. Curricula is here to be understood as something that needs to be developed throughout and especially in times of the 4th industrial revolution when the pace is fast.

The purpose of the project is, in other words, to create a strong link between modern educational systems and businesses, so that the studies can be more directly related with the expectations of employers. The main objective of the project is to find and describe innovative approaches, study methods and develop curricula.

The project will raise the quality of studies: support lecturers in the study process and ensure wider knowledge to students. The created materials will also contain best-practices and case-studies related to future learning.

Partnership of this project is formed around the needs of participating educational institutions to provide qualified graduates to the labor market and taking into account the real needs of businesses. The partners attending in this project are from Latvia, Estonia, Sweden, Denmark, Lithuania, Iceland, Norway and Finland. Partners are interested to continue the network to exchange the best practices, develop flexible and innovative study methods, involve educational institutions at different levels and also involve companies to the project. Partners can be characterized by a high degree of internationalization, an entrepreneurial spirit and extensive collaboration with business. Inside the network has arisen that educational institutions and companies (labor-market) as well have permanently the same bottlenecks – how to prepare the students with competencies ahead of time.

Objectives and benefits

The purpose of the project is to create a strong link and real exchange of knowledge between Nordic and Baltic educational actors and future businesses in order to streamline and future-proof the studies and better meet expectations of employers and the surrounding society. The main objective of the project is to find and describe innovative approaches, study methods and develop curricula. The outputs are future oriented and focus on topics such as sustainability and digitalization. The created materials are presented in the form of best-practices and case-studies. Learnings and suggestions for how to develop the learning and teaching, related to the mentioned topics, will also be a final output of the project. The project partners are from Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland.

Partners:
Vidzeme University of Applied Sciences
Mainor AS
International School of Tallinn
Jönköping University
Aalborg University
Vilniaus kolegia/University of Applied Sciences
University of Iceland
University of Stavanger
South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences

In collaboration with:
Ulemiste City: https://www.ulemistecity.ee/en/

Results

The project benefits the partners (whole consortia) because:
 it enables participants to experience different cultures and environments, meet students and teachers/ researchers from different countries who share the same interests
 it enables to exchange the ideas and teaching methods
 it allows to get introduced with innovative companies by solving the real cases and giving them feedback
 develop research and provide research to companies
 it allows to co-operate with companies (for internships; summer job; research topics)
 it helps to create the network between educational institutions and companies, especially to exchange knowledges together with students, lecturers and experts from Nordic and Baltic
 additionally it creates the opportunity for companies in Ülemiste Future City campus for networking and exchanging knowledges together with universities; -new challenges for companies: opportunity to send practitioners to universities to teach, keep abreast of student developments and to make job offers for more successful students
Output or results

 5 ECTS study module at Arcada
For the whole consortia
 Thematic report
 Articles
 Deepened sharing and stronger network between participating partners
 New input to curricula and novel teaching and learning models

Sustainable development goals