The impact of industry participation on challenge based learning

• Autores: Kwame S. Ibwe, Ellen A. Kalinga, Nerey H. Mvungi, Hannu Tenhunen, Ville Taajamaa
• Localización: The International journal of engineering education, ISSN-e 0949-149X, Vol. 34, no. 1, 2018, págs. 187-200
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The future of learning is being revolutionized by challenge based learning (CBL), where academia offers solutions to reallife challenges. Unfortunately, in developing countries academia overlook the importance of involving stakeholders whoare the prospective owners of the solutions developed. This is because of the weak link between academic institutions andindustry in research and development activities. However, to solve real life challenges faced by the society the researchersneed to work closely and continuously with the targeted community for them to get the sense of ownership and for thesolutions to take into account all relevant factors. This paper presents the impacts realized when eight stakeholders werefully involved from identification to developing solutions of the challenges facing the electrical power sector in Tanzaniawhich is wholly managed by a public utility company TANESCO from generation to distribution. Challenge based coursesintroducedin taught PhD and MScprograms were usedto create the necessaryskills butalso to evaluatethe effectivenessofthe approach in realizing the intended objectives. Nine PhD and six MSc students were involved. The stakeholders’involvement helped the research students to align the identification of the challenges to be in line with societal perceptionrather being purely scientific and/or technical like excessive reactive power or skin effect and to work in multidisciplinaryteams. This paper presents the process adopted in real life challenges identification, the proposed solutions to the identifiedchallenges and how academia can link with industry in solving real-life problems facing the society, in particular the higherlearning institutions in developing countries