WORK-BASED LEARNING IN COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION – OPPORTUNITIES AND LIMITATIONS

Collaboration with the surrounding society is increasingly identified as high priority in the governance of Swedish universities. The contribution in the universities' immediate areas, as well as more globally, should in such contexts influence the purpose and implementation of the education. Here, work-based learning has a special role where students are active in a real workplace that may correspond to their future employment, with clear win-win situations as a result. While work-based learning can be seen as relatively well-defined for, for example, teacher or nurse training, it can be more difficult to carry out corresponding training towards a highly specialized technology industry. Students do not have the skills needed in such contexts, and representatives from the technology industry do not have the resources required to train students so that they become sufficiently independent. In addition, a change is taking place in certain parts of the technology industry, where more and more work is located at a distance, and where it is therefore no longer as relevant with training elements located in a real workplace. In such circumstances, therefore, ambitions for work-based learning need to be reviewed to consider both opportunities and limitations, in order to provide good benefits, and not interfere with constrained situations that are hard to overcome. This contribution problematizes the concept of work-based learning and looks at opportunities to reach as far as possible regarding its benefits with existing limitations. The profiling regarding work-based learning at the home university for the authors of this paper, will be addressed. A survey regarding the topic is presented based on attitudes from companies in the IT area concerning opportunities and desires, as well as student attitudes, and approaches at other selected universities. Examples of implementation in courses where the authors are involved based on student activity-oriented learning, will be presented.