LH233V Teaching and Learning for Challenge Driven Education in a Global Context, 3 ECTS

This course supports teachers in higher education in developing and implementing Challenge-Driven Education (CDE) and other types of project-based learning approaches. The course is built around a number of aspects that are crucial in challenge driven education, for example: sustainable development concepts and methods; design methodology; facilitation and supervision of student teams; assessment and grading of students teams; and engagement of external stakeholders in student projects. Through the course the participants are working with designing their own challenge-driven project courses supported by webinars, hands-on workshops, and collaboration with fellow course participants and experts. Since CDE is a relatively new concept that is still in evolution, the course participants are also to be considered as co-developers of the concept and co-creators of this course. The course is part of KTH's ambitions to increase the integration of challenge-driven education and sustainable development in all study programs and to involve more teachers in the KTH Global Development Hub (GDH). More about CDE and GDH is provided below.

Elegibility: LH201V/LH231V Teaching and Learning in Higher Education 7.5 credits or equivalent from KTH or other university.

Link to application form

For more information, please contact Anders Rosén, aro@kth.se.

Course format and schedule

The course is conducted online, blending home assignments with online webinars in Zoom. It will require about two weeks of full-time work from the participants over a four-month period.

Webinars spring 2021:

Intended learning outcomes

The objective is that the participants after finishing the course should be able to design, plan and implement challenge-driven project courses. This implies that the participants should be able to:

1. explain and discuss the concepts challenge driven education, sustainable development, innovation, key competencies, and implement these concepts in learning activities;
2. identify and analyze societal challenges and solutions in relation to UN’s Sustainable Development Goals;
3. describe, apply and introduce students to specific design methods and creativity methods suitable for open ended socio-technical projects;
4. formulate relevant learning objectives for challenge-driven learning processes and plan for and perform appropriate assessment and grading of individual students in team projects;
5. apply methods for engaging external stakeholders in challenge-driven projects;
6. plan for and assess the impact of challenge-driven projects;
7. select, apply, and motivate methodologies and exercises facilitating collaboration and innovativeness in multi-disciplinary student projects.

Examination

The course is examined through prepared and active participation in all webinars, a course design assignment reported in terms of a report and a personal reflection, and peer review of another course participant’s report.

Background to CDE & GDH

The grand challenges for humanity in the 21st century, as expressed by UN:s 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, are calling for substantial transformations of our global society to ensure sustainable living conditions for ourselves and future generations. We used to consider some countries as developed countries and others as developing countries, however in light of these challenges and goals, all countries can from now on be considered to be developing countries. These challenges are also drivers of change for our educations.

Challenge-Driven Education (CDE) is a project-based and highly student-centred learning approach where learning takes place through the identification, analysis and development of solutions to complex societal challenges. CDE projects preferably involves multi-disciplinary international student teams and are performed in close collaboration with external stakeholders who can contribute in identifying challenges and act as receivers, users, and exploiters of the results. The objective with CDE is to develop students’ disciplinary knowledge and skills, professional skills, and the broad spectrum of key competencies that are needed for addressing wicked problems and transforming our society in a sustainable direction. Examples of such competencies are systems thinking, critical thinking, integated problem solving, and competencies for communicating and collaborating across disciplines, cultures, and contexts. CDE has the potential to enhance the interaction between the university and the surrounding society and generate societal impact through development of environmentally, socially, and economically, sustainable solutions to the addressed challenges, and by students becoming change agents for sustainable development.

The course LH233V has been developed and is run by the KTH Global Development Hub (GDH) where KTH is collaborating with four African universities in developing and implementing new approaches for challenge-driven education, innovation, and research, as means for mutual learning and innovation capacity building for sustainable development.

Information about other teaching and learning courses at KTH

Overview of all courses in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education