Experiences from collaborative online education for degree and further education on circular economy

Life-long learning has been recognized to be a powerful route to meet the transient competence needs. The education during employment gives a chance to renew competences and skills. Circular Economy (CE) is one topical issue pushing us to update our skills and competences. To promote and accelerate the necessary and disruptive change in a culture, we should educate both future and present professionals. To focus on specific perspective in all applications rather than general design, a novel course on circular economy of infrastructures was created in co-operation with industry. In this paper, experiences from two CE courses are discussed to point out the special questions in lifelong learning especially considering the cooperative learning and student diversity. The participants with different backgrounds, i.e. the young degree students and further education students, were mixed together in co-operative learning schemes. The adult learners were supposed to provide their practical working experience and holistic approach, and the undergraduates in turn their modern learning and information retrieval skills. The course has been organized twice, at two universities simultaneously. The course consists of six contact teaching days. The lectures were recorded and available on line through Adobe Connect (AC). The tasks and quizzes were distributed in Moodle. The project work was done in groups composed of various participants. In latter implementation, the flipped learning methods were applied. Based on the feedback, the participants were very satisfied with the course. However, the low commitment of further education students shown as drop-outs and various delays caused problems especially in group work, thus overloading the degree students.