Continuing Professional Development by Practitioner Integrated LearningContinuing Professional Development by Practitioner Integrated Learning

• 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 devel-opment is an approach supporting lifelong learning. This ap-proach 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 ef-fectively support continuous professional development. By in-volving industry professionals as participants in university courses using problem based learning, we have designed what we call Practitioner Integrated Learning (PIL). This learning ap-proach 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 manag-ers and 16 university students in a continuing professional devel-opment effort. Based on this study, we argue that PIL is a learning approach that effectively supports continuing professional devel-opment.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Programvaruteknik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Software Engineering (hsv//eng)

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)