INTERNATIONAL COOPERATION BETWEEN TWO PROJECT LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS - A CASE STUDY

The CDIO Standards (www.cdio.org) set to focus on learning environments that support and encourage hands-on learning activities. Thus, workspaces ought to inspire students both in disciplinary and social learning. Students can learn from each other and interact with several groups in the same environment. The learning experiences focus on leading the acquisition of disciplinary knowledge simultaneously with personal and interpersonal skills, and product, process, and system building skills. In order to achieve this, active learning methods are needed to engage students in problem-solving activities. International connections and activities are typical in project-oriented organizations in many engineering domains. Especially in larger ICT companies, it is typical that projects are implemented as multi-site assignments, and different activities are running 24/7. Thus, it is important to create possibilities for students to experiences this type of environment already during their engineering studies. Project office "theFIRMA" operates in the ICT unit at Turku University of Applied Sciences (TUAS), Finland. The project office provides ICT-focused development projects to small and medium-sized companies and third sector organizations. Multicultural and multidisciplinary teams work together in challenging assignments to meet the goals of the projects. Students attain relevant disciplinary and interdisciplinary skills by participating in the projects in different roles. The cooperation discussions between TUAS and Singapore Polytechnic (SP) started in 2016, and after the decision to establish a similar learning environment to SP, planning of the cooperation model between the two learning environments was initiated. The new project office AGILE@SoC was established at SP in 2019. The activities were started with four project teams assigned to work on two industry paid projects, one being an international collaboration with TUAS. Students were organized in teams of five and were supervised by one lecturer per project. This first run of the program aims to evaluate the SP students' and supervisors' experience in the interaction with customers and overseas project teams. To identify operation gaps for future improvement for the operations of the AGILE@SoC office and to further improve the project-based teaching model.