Circular Economies, learning and Virtual Realities

Current approaches to sustainability highlight circular economy as an effective means to design solutions and products whose life cycle has been considered broadly from different sustainability angles. Caledonia campus hub partners in an EIT circular economy project e-CirP – Embedding Circular Economy into Product Design and Optimization. The project is led by Lappeenranta University of Technology.

Industries often lack the needed expertise to adapt life-cycle responsible design in business operations and models. Today’s students are tomorrow’s professionals, and need to learn how to embed principles of circular economy into product design. Caledonia campus hub brings these 2 groups together by creating modular education packages where Master students around Europe analyse genuine industrial cases by utilizing modern pedagogical approaches, such as Virtual Reality.

 

The consortium partners (TU Delft, The Netherlands; DTU, Denmark; Fraunhofer, Germany; Università di Padova, Italy; Outotec, Finland) represent high-quality expertise in circular economy research and business models. The partners co-design education modules for higher education students of engineering sciences and economy students.

Today’s students are tomorrow’s professionals.

Caledonia campus hub is a pedagogical partner that in collaboration with MrHUB (Mixed Realities Hub, University of Helsinki, Finland) creates different pedagogical solutions that will be enriched with for instance Virtual and Mixed Realities. This way, courses can be structured so that students from 5 different European countries can participate in the collaborative learning activities without physical presence in any of the given countries, enabled by digital solutions.

The collaboration in e-CirP creates lucrative possibilities for transdisciplinary curriculum development.

An essential contribution from Caledonia campus hub is also the creation of novel ways of evaluation and assessment of the educational modules and learning during the courses, enriched by Virtual and Mixed Realities. These kinds of assessment methodologies have not been excessively studied or implemented, and this creates a very interesting and future-ready opportunity for Caledonia and its institutional members.

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Text: Niclas Sandström and Anne Nevgi, Caledonia campus hub