This case is anchored around the course Smart Product Development
The course is 10 ECTS, and it is placed on the 2nd Semester Master study of Engineering, Innovation and Business.
It is a brand new course developed and taught by Elias Ribeiro da Silva and Fei Yu. We are currently running this course, i.e. in the spring semester 2020
Student profile:
Our students are normally 50% our own bachelor students continued and 50% new students, and they are very international.
Course characteristics
Max capacity 36 students
This is a mandatory course Link to the course description
The case challenge – in short terms:
We announce two challenges. Taking research based teaching to the next level and the dilemma that our preferred learning formats, workshops, do not match the number of students.
The Entrepreneurship and Innovation related goals for the course:
This course focuses on the smart ways of product development and the development of smart products. It will create a holistic view on product development, and topics of product life cycle management will be covered. Students will explore several emerging technologies and tools in different activities during the course. What technologies and tools are available for product development, when should a technology be adopted in the process, how to adopt the tools, and what will be the impact to the whole product life-cycle, will be discussed in the class.
Our vision of competences for a student who has passed the course.
They should have a holistic view on the whole product development and product life-cycle process, and they should be able to evaluate the product value proposition. Based on these, they should be able to decide what technology should be used at what stage to optimize the product development process.
The teaching format
By now, we are satisfied with the content and teaching format.
We arrange workshops and visits to different companies.
We define the topic based on a “real-world” problem in connection to both industry, a specific solution developed by a local company, and academia, the thesis topic of a PhD student.
A rubric is created to evaluate the assignments and exam.
The challenges
Integrating students into research!
A general challenge is time. As a researchers, we have to spend a lot of time for teaching and project management, and too little time for doing research. How can we increase the synergy between teaching and research?
Within the limited time we would like to create maximum output on both teaching and research.
But again, converting student work to research outputs is still challenging.
Workshop methods
There is another minor issue. Several workshops are arranged in the course. Some of them are difficult to run with more than 16 students at a time, e.g. the Virtual Reality workshop. We have 26 students in all.