Continuing professional development by practitioner integrated learning

Anna Borjesson, Lars Pareto, Ulrika Lundh Snis, Miroslaw Staron
2007 Companion to the 22nd ACM SIGPLAN conference on Object oriented programming systems and applications companion - OOPSLA '07  
To prevent skilled professionals from being phased out or forced into professions for which they are not talented, organized forms of lifelong learning are needed. Continuing professional development is an approach supporting lifelong learning. This approach is however criticized for being expensive and not providing the necessary knowledge. In response to this, we have executed a study in order to understand how universities can effectively support continuous professional development. By
more » ... ing industry professionals as participants in university courses using problem based learning, we have designed what we call Practitioner Integrated Learning (PIL). This learning approach has shown positive effects in terms of level of learning, realism, knowledge diffusion, study load and costs. We present a 15-months action research project integrating 16 industry managers and 16 university students in a continuing professional development effort. Based on this study, we argue that PIL is a learning approach that effectively supports continuing professional development.
doi:10.1145/1297846.1297941 dblp:conf/oopsla/BorjessonPSS07 fatcat:7wjqrin6mrf2ndjyh4wrdcdpt4