After the launch of BUCSBIN on August 2017, Kathmandu University School of Management (KUSOM), King’s College , Idea Studio Nepal, OAMK Labs and YoungInnovations collaboratively organised an event ‘Inspiration, Iteration and Innovation’ on 24th May to 27th May at Summit Hotel , Kupandole. The participants were mainly academicians and practitioners.
Beyond regular social interaction, networking and coaching that most of the workshops/seminars offers, this time the outcomes were more rewarding. The core objective of the event was to give the participants an overview on the learning system in Oamk LABs, a pre-incubator and incubator program within Oulu University of Applied Sciences in Finland. The essence of the practices at Oamk LABs is to bridge the academic work with the work-life.
The Lab Masters - Ulla‐Maija Seppänen and Janne Karjalainen did a fantastic job maintaining the learning momentum in the 4 -days workshops. The session ambitiously attempted many things: Work-life orientation, creative problem-solving, interdisciplinary participation, concept development, learning by doing, self reflection, constructive feedback and amazingly it succeeded, largely due to the well-structured and balanced approach of the Lab Masters.
Photo Courtesy: Umesh Dai
The 36 hours of workshop/ seminar gave participants a chance to reflect on the insights on project based learning and an opportunity to start trying out the tools and approaches discovered in the workshop back to their pedagogic work. The GCEC (Global Consortium of entrepreneurship centers) award winning model was designed in such a way that it had a high learning curve and that there was never a dull moment. Day 1 started with a challenge given in 2–3 person teams. The objective was to explore problems. On Day 2 was more of Gate presentations and further working on challenge in 3–5 person teams for ideation and building understanding of the problem. Then, Day 3 was a based on prototyping, testing and final presentations. Finally, Day 4 was seminar day with more insights on interdisciplinary learning and Oamk LABs.
As a part of feedback, at the end of each day, participants were asked to comment on their take of the overall workshop sessions. The responses were overwhelmingly good.
In the scenario where evidence based learning is still lacking in our academics, these types of training can be very crucial in supporting and expanding capacity of educational institutions. Future of education is more of T-model learning where students will be able to address problems into the depth in their core area of expertise, and at the same time , will also be equipped with broad skill set and understand specialists from a wide range of disciplines and functional areas. The interdisciplinary project based learning is just right for such situation.
The work doesn’t end here! As a next step, Project BUCSBIN will try to bridge gap of theoretical learning and work life by guiding 50 interdisciplinary students on design skills on June 2018 with the event ‘Concept Development for Impact’. We are already excited to roll the next event and get empowered !
