OEB 2019: Solving Skills Gaps and Preparing Students for Industry

OEB 2019, Berlin, 27-29 November, will show learning and edtech professionals how technology can overcome skills gaps and better prepare students for the workplace. The Conference will explore the impact of AI and a new view on designing educational programmes that deliver on learners’ and employers’ needs.

 

OEB 2019 has tasked itself with providing a far reaching exploration of how to bridge the skills gaps between education and industry. The conference will look at the impact of AI, data and education technologies and hear from education professionals who have successfully overcome skills gaps. We will hear about practical programmes and projects in use at higher education institutions to find out what’s working.

A series of expert panels, presentations and cafe sessions will provide lively and insightful debate, led by real-world practitioners who will share their experiences.

EXPERT PANEL: The Future is Bright – on AI, Curricula and Skills Gaps

To understand how AI changes and can improve teaching and learning, we need to understand how it is reshaping the nature of work as well. This panel will show how AI transforms labour markets and education and investigates how machine learning can be used to identify skills and curriculum gaps.

EXPERT PANEL: Learning for Future Skills

Building the skills of the workforce for tomorrow is no longer possible using just an annual curriculum and schedule of classroom training. Today, these have to be carefully targeted at what’s suitable for students and institutions and organisations and employees. This session shows how data can be used both in Higher Education to prepare graduates for work, and looks at how smart automation can be used to re-skill employees fast when a company’s way of working changes

 

EXPERT PANEL: The Future of University-Industry Collaboration

What are the requirements for a higher education institution to live and breathe project-based learning? What does a successful partnership-based curriculum look like? How are workplaces organising these relations with institutions? And what is their strategy to link students’ skills to the needs of internal innovation departments?

Two edtech leaders with expertise in industry partnerships will lead this moderated “fireside talk”: Tom Bachem, Founder, CODE University of Applied Sciences, Germany and Eric Lindig, Business Development, University Relations and Academic Partnerships at Zalando, Germany.

 

EXPERT PANEL: Educational Systems Designed to Offer Better Learning Experiences and Learning Outcomes

OEB has asked three edtech professionals with experience of education platforms and programmes to prepare students for successful future careers: Pegor Papazian, TUMO Center for Creative Technologies, Armenia; Claudia Roeschmann, Texas State University, USA; and Sharan Singh, Minerva Project, USA. The panel will share the techniques and instructional-design principles they applied, their pedagogical strategies, their views on support and guidance for students, and more.

 

LEARNING CAFE: Creating Employability-focussed Learning Outcomes to Develop Graduate Students’ Attributes

A team of four from The University of Northampton, UK, Rachel Maxwell, Alejandro Armellini, Shirley Bennett and Ivna Reic, will show how to support and prepare students to acquire graduate-level employment. In this Learning Café, participants will be able to re-write or create new, employability-focussed learning outcomes for their courses and programmes based on the “Changemaker Outcomes for Graduate Success” toolkit.

 

KNOWLEDGE FACTORY SESSION: Bridging the Digital-skills Gap through Staff-Student Partnerships

OEB has invited learning technologist Blaneth McSharry, to share her experiences of The Digital Champions project at NUI Galway, which provides a case study on building a digital learning community on campus. OEB will hear how the institution designed and delivered collaborative, innovative and creative approaches to building confidence and ‘cascading’ knowledge and digital skills. Their openly licensed toolkit provides a comprehensive guide to implementing a similar initiative and in this session participants will start with the creation of an action plan for staff/student partnerships and workshops to improve digital confidence.

Registration for OEB 2019 is available via the event website.