CESE is important to higher education and fits well with international developments in higher education because it develops methods for integrating the complete knowledge triangle with a focus of being relevant for the future society in the pyramid (communication), giving students a unique learning outcome. The pyramid encompasses all higher education independent of academic discipline. The novice student enters the pyramid through the corner of education. By a successive learning process, the student moves into the three interconnected dimensions of innovation, research and communication. An educated professional will meet societal needs with a
voluminous and interwoven understanding and skills. The pyramid stimulates higher education sector as it moves the institution’s focus from filling students with knowledge to develop skills towards a sustainable knowledge-based future. Pyramid learning opens for the new pedagogies necessary to meet society in the Knowledge Age 8. According to the New Learning Paradigm, professionals well equipped with the 21st century skills do not only hold the core skills (reading, writing and arithmetics), but also learning and innovation skills, career and life skills, and digital literacy skills 9. The job readiness of a candidate in this context can be described as a function of the sum of these skills 10 and is well encompassed in our pyramid learning approach.
Intended novelties and transformations of current practices. Educational quality is a collective capacity on campus 11. We will develop this further to include the whole community consisting of the students, administration, technical staff and the central administration and management at HUAS. This will fulfil infrastructural needs, service and information, social and emotional environment. We will all contribute to «capacity building» and we will all develop knowledge,
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skills and general competence to create an education that improves the learning outcome for the students. These will also ensure the social capital on campus 12 creating close relations between teachers, students and colleagues which is determinant for high quality teaching 13. The learning community will give the student membership, influence, fulfilment of individual needs and shared events and emotional connectionsh. Campus Evenstad is indeed a good model to develop and evaluate the success of such learning communities because it is a community of its own with a large number of students living on campus; we are developing expertise in all four corners of the pyramid, on on-campus studies where students and staff are present on campus, and all depend on each other. However, awareness of this development requires an exciting cultural change among all staff as we today are mostly focused on research and education. The pyramid learning requires an openness and will to accept and learn about innovation as an important dimension of our community for future students. To a large extent research, innovation, and communication will be integrated in all learning outcomes in all courses where it belongs naturally, and definitely be apparent in the study curriculum. We are still not able to grasp these interconnections and the consequences for teaching and campus development. Such a complete learning environment 14 will require a universal design of teaching material and a higher awareness among staff on their
positive contribution to service and information and the social environment.
Students are active in the development and innovation processes by being members of the CESE’s steering board and the creative reference group (see organisation below). Already the first day of school start we will introduce students to CESE and invite them to participate in the
development of the centre. The student council is involved in curriculum planning, course planning, implementation and evaluation.
Important milestones to realize the ambitions are described in the attached action plan.
An SFU Centre Award will make it possible for us to (1) realize our ideas about pyramid learning, learning communities and new teaching methods on campus; (2) develop innovation and
communication as part of our study curriculum; (3) disseminate our results and create methods and courses so we can share our experience with other institutions and disciplines to improve and generalise future learning methodology; (4) do research on the outcome of CESE with regard to the learning outcome’s relevance for the society; and improved capacity building among staff; and (5) realize a Pyramid app for institutional strategic development that allows evaluation of how the institution’s academic profile is understood (see next paragraph).
Page 8 Evaluation and impact framework
We will evaluate the impact by studying various variables through time. For the student perspective: We will establishing an internal evaluation of (1) competence among incoming students; and (2) learning outcomes relative to aimed learning outcomes in the curriculum among graduating students. As we realize the centre we expect 2 to increase and stabilize among students independent of incoming competence. We will also measure (3) the number of student
contributions in research production, conferences, in the media, and establishment of
companies/patents. We will continue with the Student satisfactory survey and expect increased student satisfaction, less variation among years in satisfaction with regard to learning outcome, student social environment and service and information. The staff perspective: We will expect an even higher affiliation to the working place through the existing time of CESE. We will also evaluate and expect an increase in R&D production, popular dissemination of results, improved results in student evaluation of courses, and a higher participation in student social events. The institutional perspective: We will evaluate CE with regard to (1) the number of primary applicants to our studies; (2) formal incoming competence of our students; (3) the proportion of graduating students that are in a relevant job situation 6 months after graduation, We will also develop a Pyramid app to evaluate (4) academic reputation by asking our students, stakeholders and others yearly about how they define CE in the knowledge triangle/pyramid. Today we expect incoming students to score us close to the education part of the triangle, stakeholders between education and research, while others in the society may score us close to research. Through time we hope to change this towards the middle of the triangle or to the core of the knowledge pyramid.
We will also ask staff to score themselves in the pyramid and expect a change trough time towards communication and innovation. We will use these scores for strategic development of CE. We will also ask graduating students to see how their score changes through their education. The
stakeholder perspective: Increased success of R&D in association with stakeholders, a higher number of invitation to R&D projects by stakeholders, increased job opportunities for our students (as registered in national lists, www.nav.no).
CESE will contribute to and stimulate institutional development by sharing pyramid learning through the TLC which also consists of coordinators from all HUAS’ faculties. TLC will share a staff member between TLC and CESE which will ensure institutional development through
seminars across disciplines. HUAS is experienced as a multiple campus institution (5 campus) and we have well incorporated routines to learn across campus.
CESE will gauge value for money primarily by being relevant for society, by producing candidates that get relevant jobs, that contribute positively to a green transition in a sustainable
Page 9 society, and that are entrepreneurs and managers of natural resources and obtain more R&D
projects for public authorities and industry. CE will increase its reputation and the positive contribution of our students in the society will increase the society’s use of us, e.g. obtain more R&D projects for public authorities and industry. CE’s ambition is to become a National
competence centre for sustainability by being in front academically, by defining sustainability, and in front for stakeholders by operationalising sustainability.
CESE will be sustainable post funding by obtaining higher production and increased result component of the financial model. We will have higher success on external funding, specifically from RCN and EU as we will be able to combine research and innovation and collaborate inter- and transdisciplinary. Post funding, products from CESE, e.g. courses, course material and similar may be payment-based. TLC will also have a competence that can support post-funding activities.
Dissemination
CESE will share developed knowledge and practices across campus within HUAS, within green education in Norway, among National higher education institutions, and internationally through our networks (Nordnatur, IRSAE and PERL). Internationally, PERL will be an important collaborator for sharing knowledge in their conferences and publications. We will develop an active and interactive web-page, course material and web-based courses in open access, arrange conferences, contribute in other’s conferences, and collaborate with other Centres for Excellent Education. We will contribute to the international scientific environment of education research by employing a PhD student working on the outcome of pyramid learning as well as publications from other researchers following the outcome of our initiatives.
CESE will collaborate with PERL (see above) and The Centre for Studies of Educational Practice at the Faculty of Education and Natural Sciences at Campus Hamar (SEPU - http://eng.hihm.no/
project-sites/sepu) which is the National leading research centre for innovation in education. SEPU will be involved in research with regard to our achievements, co-supervise a PhD-candidate and contribute to the development of our learning community and education skills in seminars and workshops. To achieve an interdisciplinary knowledge base we will collaborate with philosophers, environmental psychologists, and economists at the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Economics and Organizational Sciences at Lillehammer University College. With regard to innovation we will collaborate with Youth Entrepreneurship (http://www.ue.no) to develop the students creativity and believe in themselves, Tretorget (http://www.tretorget.no/) which is a Centre for innovation and achievements for the wood processing value chain, that runs
development projects and have a business incubator and provide consulting (www.tretorget.no), and the Centre for Innovation in Service and the Centre for Travel Research (related to nature
Page 10 based tourism) at Lillehammer University College. Norwegian Environment Agency contributes in communication and nature interpretation.
Dissemination approaches differ with target groups. Across Faculties at HUAS, dissemination arenas are the planned annual CESE-seminar, the annual HUAS Quality Conference, TLC and the internal course on higher education pedagogics for newly employed staff. Across national and international higher education (HE)-sector, we will invite HE-institutions and partners of our educational networks (Nordnatur, IRSAE) to our annual CESE conferences and seminars and organise courses and visits on campus. We will share our methods and experiences at national and international conferences of education, in peer-reviewed journals and popular scientific articles.
We will specifically seek for collaboration with other Centres of Excellence to exchange experiences and synergize efforts. Another target group are regional elementary and high schools which will be invited for collaboration.
The academic leadership is engaged in disseminating CESE. The last 6 months campus leaders have already communicated ideas about the learning pyramid to HUAS’ steering board, various departments at Hedmark County Council (county politicians, international sector, bioeconomy strategy, business development), County Governor of Hedmark), the hosting municipality administration and politicians, 200 leaders in the forestry industry in Norway in the Østerdals-conference, Eastern Norway Research Institute, Karlstad University in Sweden, staff at Norwegian Environment Agency, Innovation Norway in Hedmark county, NITO labour organisation for ingenieurs and technicians, local labour party, 120 visitors to our Wolf cafeteria, 100 participants of our regional business seminar, some non-governmental institutions and high schools visiting the campus.
ORGANISATION AND ACTIONM PLAN OF CESE