Propositions from universities, according work based learning to improve employability, point out that industry close projects are strongly encouraged. CDIO does, neither in the standards nor in the syllabus, explicitly mention that experiences should take place in direct cooperation with industry. Certainly reasons behind this may include difficulties to find sustainable cooperation between academia and industrial partners, and how well industry projects live up to appropriate learning outcomes. Therefore, developing new concepts according industry close cooperation should illuminate on potentials for sustainability and reasonable learning structures. Furthermore, research based student projects with similar work based forms as industry close projects, need the same correspondences to learning outcomes as industry close project do. Hence, concepts developed for industry close projects should be suitable also for research projects.
Demola, originating from Tampere, Finland, is a collaborative open innovation platform for students, universities and companies. Its successful award-winning approach has influenced several other European regions to participate in the Demola network. The concept relies on well-established agreements between universities, students and companies. Companies act with low risk and may experiment on innovative real-life systems with help from multi-disciplinary student teams. Projects are controlled by contracts between a student group and a company, where satisfactory developments are financially regulated. Here, innovation is in focus which makes Demola clearly different from more practice oriented work based projects. This in turn sheds light on the ownership of the product where this lies on the student group. The corresponding company may then in case of success choose to procure the full rights of the project results.
Demola has recently been introduced in what is called Demola South Sweden, involving several participants from academia, companies and other organizations from that region. So far, there have been positive experiences in Demola South Sweden, from the point of views of involved teacher’s, companies, students, as well as the Demola organization itself. Such results has also emphasized the interest in development of research projects in the context of Demola. During autumn semester 2014 a research project with participants from both academia and industry, has partially been studied and developed in the context of Demola. It is here especially interesting to study the value of the students’ learning process, as well as the value for the research project as such.
This contribution will present how Demola generally may contribute to CDIO based learning. Experiences from different stakeholders will be covered. Especially, the values of the research project as a student learning process will be presented in terms of the CDIO Syllabus learning outcomes. To generally increase Demola as a learning platform, correspondences to the CDIO Syllabus will be studied and presented. Here it is of specific interest to illuminate on the points of views of the organization behind Demola itself.
Proceedings of the 11th International CDIO Conference, Chengdu, China, June 8-11 2015
Conceive
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