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Abstract:

In response to the observation that change is the only constant in today’s working environments, leading organizations in the fields of education have placed the principle of “life-long learning” (LLL) atop the curricular agenda. Also in engineering education, it is widely accepted that graduating students need to have "a recognition of the need for, and an ability to engage in life-long learning" (ABET 2013). This contribution describes a LLL trajectory that was recently developed at the Faculty of Industrial Engineering Technology, Campus Diepenbeek (KU Leuven & UHasselt). The curricular pathway and the learning environments were designed following Dochy’s guidelines for “high impact learning”, with student ownership and (self-)reflection as critical components. From the start, students engage in a sequence of curricular activities that integrate the acquisition of soft and hard skills in increasingly challenging problem-based project courses. The learning experiences from this curricular pathway inform the student’s development of a personal LLL portfolio that not only charts but also structures and guides the student’s personal learning trajectory. This LLL portfolio is initiated by a multi-angled self-assessment, which provides the basis for a self-constructed “PDP” (“personal development plan”). Typically, the PDP also accommodates extra-curricular activities (e.g. community service learning, MOOCs, peer teaching,…) selected by the student to complement his or her competency profile. As with the curricular activities, the student then reflects upon these activities - now using the 4Rs model (reporting, relating, reasoning, reconstructing) – and integrates them in his or her PDP, which is, as such, continually reworked.