[EIIC] European Education Trends and BEST as an Open Social Learning Organisation

European Education Trends and BEST as an Open Social Learning Organisation Nikolena Christofil

Marta Filipa Cortesao

National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) for the Board of European Students of Technology (BEST) Email: nikolena.christofi@BEST.eu.org

Faculty of Sciencies of the University of Porto (FCUP) for the Board of European Students of Technology (BEST) Email: marta.cortesao@BEST.eu.org

Egle Brovkaite

Aggeliki Marini

Kaunas University of Technology for the Board of European Students of Technology (BEST) Email: egle.brovkaite@BEST.eu.org

National Technical University of Crete (T.U.C.) for the Board of European Students of Technology (BEST) Email: aggeliki.marini@BEST.eu.org

Abstract—The expansion of technology has introduced a new era of information and internationalization as well as new opportunities for learning. This has lead companies, organizations, and research institutes all around the world to re-evaluate their working methods to meet the current needs of society.

Consequently, the adaptation of new educational objectives to meet the current needs of the corporate world is becoming essential to guarantee a sustainable education.

With open social learning, students benefit from the vast amount of available information online, depending on their personal needs, with the help of mentors throughout the way, under the umbrella of collaborative learning. The advantages of open social learning are being investigated and many platforms are being developed, so that students all around the world can take advantage of this new era of information.

The Board of European Students of Technology (BEST) has been working towards identifying the needs and trends of the Educational System in Europe in the Tertiary Level, by facilitating proactive discussions of educational matters between the three stakeholders - companies, universities and students.

The outcomes of these discussions are being presented on this paper, identifying some of the educational trends, along with the contribution of BEST as a non-governmental organization in the sustainability of an open social learning platform for university students.

I. I NTRODUCTION It has been previously identified that there is a gap between the university knowledge and the skills needed in the corporate world. This has made soft-skills, internships and the proactive involvement of every education stakeholder essential in the search for ways of bridging this gap. The modern educational methods suggest that the students should develop skills such as creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and problem solving, with the aim to face the challenges of the 21st century [1].

Recently, new methodologies and approaches took advantage of technology to facilitate communication, access to knowledge, offering a wide range of opportunities for motivated students to learn. The expansion of e-learning of which, virtual mobility, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and virtual internships are part of, are providing new pathways of online knowledge acquirement and skills development.

In particular, MOOCs provide an outstanding opportunity to showcase National Technical Universities globally, and the belief that when placed in the context of a blended-learning environment can lead to better learning outcomes is growing [2].

The open social learning method breaks down in two key elements: content is open, and learning is social. Learners are called to discover the knowledge based on their own personal needs and motivation, while mentors facilitate and aid the learning process. So it essentially requires an active involvement of the student in the learning process, and peerlearning.

One of the essential components of the educational experience in online courses is collaborative learning [3]. The idea is to utilize the experience of the millions of previous learners to teach the new learner. In this way, user comments, ratings, annotations and refer a friend feature, are some of the powerful user generated data that can form the basis of analysis and filtering. Similar to pedagogy, behavior and learning style of individual learners are two common factors that should be taken into account for sequencing and reordering of the content. Collaborative tagging systems can facilitate not only the indexing of information but also social learning through the process of knowledge assimilation and accommodation [4].

Under this scope, and towards the reinforcement of collaborative learning, the use of open social learning platforms allow to utilise the benefits of collaborative, online learning, with the active involvement of the learner. Learners are now willing to contribute to the construction of knowledge [5], and higher education institutions are responding by shifting towards a learner centric education, which, as Vassileva emphasizes, is a main goal in the design of Social Learning Environments [6]. The main challenges with the Learner-centered approach in social learning are the handling of the context and make learning more gratifying. Therefore, there are three important factors that influence a learner-centered approach: 1. Support the learner in finding right content 2. Support the learner to connect with the right people 3. Motivate the learner to learn.

II. BEST AND E DUCATION R ESEARCH Board of European Students of Technology (BEST) is a non-governmental students association, founded in 1989 which is currently active in 36 European countries through 96 local BEST groups (LBGs). Each LBG is associated with a university, thus reaching around 1.3 million students of science and engineering. BEST promotes the development of students within an international mindset on three main areas: complementary education, career support and educational involvement. Moreover, BEST strives to facilitate the communication between education stakeholders - Company, University and Students - in order to improve European Education and prepare students for their future working careers.

One of BEST focus areas is to raise students awareness of educational involvement.

In the past years the Educational Committee of BEST has gathered the input of technology students all around Europe and has identified the need for the educational system to be reconstructed in order to meet the new challenges of today.

This input is collected through the organization Events on Education (EoEs) and running student surveys. EoEs are 1 week events where around 22 European technology students along with company and university representatives gather to discuss educational matters. The outcomes of EoEs are disseminated to the involved and other interested parties such as companies and higher education institutions, and help to discover new pathways in the European Engineering Education. The most recent EoEs have been held in LBG Timisoara and LBG Aveiro in 2013, and last year in LBG Gdansk and LBG ClujNapoca (2014). These EoEs have help to identify some of the current needs of Education, based on the input from the students, professors, companies and experts on the field of education.

III. C URRENT N EEDS OF E DUCATION The lack of soft skills development within the curricula program, was identified as one the biggest issues the current educational system is facing. Developing soft skills is crucial for a modern engineer, who is everyday challenged to combine hard-skills with personality traits, such as teamwork, communication and presentation skills, leadership. Furthermore, students seek for joint activities with other students, to meet and connect with each other, and work and exchange ideas; this confirms Banduras belief and Social Learning Theory, that humans learn from each other effectively [7].

Internships have been identified by both students and higher education institutions as a way to bridge the gap between university and career life [8] and offer the development of some soft skills as well as technical skills. Essentially, students require tutorship and support during their internship as well as more flexibility; time and location-wise.

E-learning has also been acknowledged as a way of bridging this gap, and mainly focusing on Virtual Internships (VIs). It was pointed out that as mobility, flexibility, autonomy and variety of options were the advantages of Vis [9]. Great emphasis was given on the form and level of interaction

between the stakeholders during the VI (student, university, company). In their opinion, they consider constant mentorship and communication between the three stakeholders the key to success [10]. Students state that more hand-on-projects, like case studies and group projects as well as internships opportunities, contribute to their soft skills development, an objective that is missing from their university curricula.

The outcome of the EoEs demonstrate new kind of trends such as VIs, which add in greatly in students development, working as a creativity booster and further involvement in their field of expertise, which also help them to achieve an international mindset, to reach a better understanding of cultures and societies and to develop the capacity to work in culturally diverse environments, thus bridging the gap between university and work life.

It has been identified that for conducting successfully a collaborative learning activity it is required, among others, the existence of a common goal [11], positive interdependence among peers [12], and the mechanisms for coordinating and communicating [13].

IV. BEST BRIDGING THE GAP WITH O PEN S OCIAL L EARNING BEST promotes an international mindset focused on three main areas: complementary education; career support; educational involvement. Within these areas, there are several events organised by BEST members, counting not only with the participation of European students but also with other stakeholders, such as companies and university representatives.

The organisation of these events implies teamwork and constant communication between the organising members, asking for the use of a wide range of soft skills as well as the use of technology and internet to assure the success of the event. Moreover, contact with experts, such as professors and CEOs makes the involved students aware of the world beyond university studies. Since often physical meetings are not possible, working methods that allow the members to roll out their work successfully and on time had to be developed.

For this reason, BEST has developed its own set of working methods and practices, in a struggle to eliminate the distance and increase of efficiency, as shown below in Table 1.

BEST has been developing internally its knowledgemanagement and working methods in order to preserve and transfer the knowledge from generation to generation, while constant collaboration and communication between the members, team spirit and support are the main characteristics of the work carried out, all under the umbrella of BESTs vision, values and aims. The matching between the services and activities of BEST that go along with the current needs of education, is presented below in Table 2.

For BEST, virtual collaboration among its members has always been a necessity. Although it was fairly restricted in the 90s technology level at the time, big projects nowadays often establish real time virtual work between the involved entities. Both the organising and participating students gain skills according to the trends in European Higher Education

BEST Event

Description

European BEST Engineering Competition (EBEC)

Gives students the opportunity to use their theoretical knowledge gained during the University, by being challenged to solve interdisciplinary tasks. It is a project that targets mainly engineering students, and is able to offer them a good quality content that can help them develop themselves in an international environment.

BEST Courses

BEST Courses on Technology, Career Related Skills and Applied Engineering were envisioned with the purpose of complementing the education of the students of technology participating in them and in this way contribute to their development as students. The principle is simple, each year BEST offers around 85 of such courses, averaging a little lower than one course per LBG per year, that last for at least one week and which allow around 22 students, from diverse technology backgrounds, to have the chance to learn about new topics being delivered either by professors or other professionally accredited entities.

BEST Career day (BCD)

BEST Career Day is an international career event that helps 100 European students every year to shape their career by participating in several activities and meeting with representatives of top employers & top universities of Europe. It is also a great opportunity for students to network & meet with other young talents from different countries.

Events on Education (EoEs)

Gather 22 European students, along with companies and universities representatives, to discuss, share knowledge and contribute to new ideas on education-related topics. Through the continuous exchange of opinions and experience, the perspectives of each stakeholder meet, allowing the development of new ideas to improve European Education. There is usually 2 EoEs per year.

TABLE I BEST E VENTS

BEST Services What students need from their higher institutions

External BEST Academic Courses on Technology

Leadership Teamwork Communication Presentation skills

Internal BEST Career Day (BCD)

x x x

Organize Local Events

Organize International Events

Paper Writing and Participation in Conferences

x x x

x x x

x x x x

Technical Writing Networking

x

Internships

x

x

x

TABLE II BEST MATCHING NEW TRENDS IN EDUCATION

by learning and developing through meeting, discussing and working together, virtually and physically.

V. F UTURE OF E DUCATION The expansion of Learning Management Systems (LMS), which made Personal Learning Environments (PLE) a reality and online learning platforms available to learners all around the world leads to dramatic changes in the learning process and the traditional teaching methods of the past. An example is the constant development of computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL), which incorporates collaborative learning activities and communications between participants and among groups via networked computers, where interactions can be

synchronous or asynchronous [14].

The anywhere-anytime characteristic of the CSCL, plus its support of interactive group learning made educators believe that CSCL is the next generation of teaching and learning environment [15]. Yet, current research shows that despite variety of benefits provided by virtual learning environments, learners isolation and lack of sociability of the virtual space are emerging as key pitfalls for effectiveness of those environments in future systems development activities [16]. Therefore, optimizing the learning experience, using sophisticated machine learning algorithms could make Social Learning more effective and an alternate way of learning [17].

VI. C ONCLUSION The outcomes of our Events on Education seem to match the new trends in higher education as observed by other research institutes and interested bodies around the globe. The trends declare that higher education must be creative, innovative and exceptional as never before. Interdisciplinary courses and soft skills development have to be integrated in university curricula. Students need more opportunities for internships that suit their needs (interesting subject, constand tutorship throughout the internship) and can meet their busy schedule.

However, they need more flexibility and reachability, and open social learning (VIs, MOOCs) is the great tool that provides all the means to success. Our functionality as organization, the learning opportunities we give to our members and the services we provide to the students relate to current needs of the time and will continue to evolve, with activities that meet the educational needs of the technological students in Europe.

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