“What’s really exciting is that four regions have together come up with a challenge that our ECIU students are getting to grips with”, says Jan Axelsson, director of collaboration at LiU.
One of the universities, the University of Aveiro in Portugal, was, however, compelled to withdraw at the last minute.
“This was a shame, but we’ve just had the first meeting with students in Twente, and will be meeting the students in Stavanger soon. And I’m really struck by how multidisciplinary the group is”, says Markus Pettersson.
Broad competence
His own background includes a master’s degree in economics with a subsidiary in French, and he is now taking a master’s in IT and management. Maria Lokat is taking the master’s programme Energy, Environment, Management, while one of the two students from the Netherlands is studying mechanical engineering, the other psychology. They haven’t met the Norwegian students yet, but from what they’ve heard they will broaden the knowledge and expertise of the group even more.The project they have just started has been given the name “STIRR, Smart Transport in Rurban Regions.”
In collaboration with regions
Both the InGenious course and the pilot course now being given by ECIU have an external client who is also recipient of the ideas and suggestions that arise during the course. The client can then choose whether to pay for the rights to the ideas or allow the students themselves to take them further. The clients in this case is this case are the three regions in which the universities are active. For Maria Lokat and Markus Pettersson, the client is Region Östergötland.“We will start by contacting the relevant region to discover what the greatest challenges are: what works well and what can be improved. Then we will compare with the others and see whether there are any common challenges that we can solve. We will look at what the regions can learn from each other”, says Maria Lokat.
The students take compulsory courses at their home university, with the possibility of participating remotely in courses at the other universities. Maybe the greatest challenge will be that they will not physically meet each other – at least not until the final reporting and end of the course, which, if all goes to plan, will take place in Studenthuset at LiU on 11 December.
Ingenious as a model
“We really hope that the others can come here then: it would be amazing. We’ve all become accustomed to digital meetings during the corona pandemic, and I did my degree project completely remotely during the spring. It worked great”, says Markus Pettersson.
The ECIU pilot course follows the course syllabus that LiU has used for several years for the eight-credit InGenious course, otherwise known as the “Cross Disciplinary Project”.
“It’s both exciting and challenging to get a course running from three different universities. There’s a lot we can learn here about how to operate a virtual university”, says Fredrik Borgsjö, who from the start has been the driving force behind the InGenious course, which is now owned and operated in collaboration with Almi Östergötland.
“It’s an honour to be able to take the first course within the ECIU university and to be something of a guinea pig. We want to make a success of this, and not just write a report that gets filed away in some archive”, says Maria Lokat.
In addition to STIRR, nine other multidisciplinary projects are being conducted within InGenious this year, with students from various educational programmes at LiU.
Translated by George Farrants.
