PROMOTING NEW EXPERTISE IN HIGHER EDUCATION BY INTEGRATING RESEARCH AND INNOVATION ACTIVITIES IN THE HIGHER EDUCATION LEARNING PROCESSES

The higher education institutions (HEIs) of today are expected to educate professionals for the future working life, which requires both professional expertise on specific field and multiple other skills that are mostly related to the new processes of working. In the field of engineering sciences, for example, detailed knowledge on specific technique or technologic field needs to be combined with project management knowledge, social and communication skills, business intelligence and financial knowledge. Moreover, multidisciplinary knowledge from different fields, for example knowledge on information and communication technology (ICT) combined with expertise on health care is highly valued. In addition, the graduating students are expected to have experience on processes of working life and abilities to cope changes, stress and uncertainty. At the same time, the HEIs are encouraged to support their activities on external project funding. In order to find solutions to these challenges, the research, development and innovation (RDI) activities are integrated in practical teaching and learning in Turku University of Applied Sciences (TUAS). The RDI activities include research and development projects that are mainly implemented on external funding from various sources, e.g. European Union. The students' participation in the project activities is implemented e.g. by project courses that are integrated in the curricula of the degree programmes. Students' participation in the RDI activities forms a linkage between teaching and research: it connects these processes and contributes to the development of innovative learning environments in HEIs. Further, students' involvement in RDI promotes students' professional skills, innovative working methods and appliance of theoretical knowledge into practice. However, integration of RDI activities and teaching requires new tools both for the students and the teachers. For the students, participation in RDI integrated teaching calls for active attitude to learning, internal motivation and ability to apply theoretical knowledge into practice. From the teacher's perspective, the project courses challenge the traditional ideas of the course contents, teaching methods, learning outcomes, evaluation criteria and estimation of students' workload. In this paper, we discuss the challenges of integrating research to education in higher education level and present some methods for this. Based on our experiences on RDI integrated teaching in TUAS, we present the outcomes and discuss the future perspectives of teaching and learning.