Students´ Role in Design-Implement Experiences – Case: Health Informatics Project

Health Informatics has been one of the focus areas of Information Technology education in Turku University of Applied Sciences since 2009. Since the beginning of the focus area we have been implementing CDIO-based procedures and standards such as active learning and design-build experiences. Our education is strongly connected with the industry and many research and development actitivies have been carried out with the industry and our eHealth Technologies Research group. Our RDI activities are strongly connected with the degree programmes and learning is embedded into the RDI projects too. Our students learn, work and earn credits in these real-life design-implemented experiences. One recent example of such a project is “Tools for information and language technology for the utilisation of health information for patients and professionals” RDI project (TAILOR in brief) funded by Tekes (the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation). In this project our eHealth Technologies Research Group´s Lab facilities, engineering and business information systems students work together with healthcare professionals. Other research partner in this project is University of Turku. In addition, there are number of industry partners involved such as Lingsoft, Fujitsu, BCB Medical and Hospital District of South-West Finland. In this paper we will describe how we used the physical learning environment in laboratories and in hospitals to support the learning of product, process, and system building skills. Furthermore, we will report how we combine the emphasis on building products and implementing processes in real-world contexts giving students opportunities to make connections between the technical content they are learning and their professional and career interests. The main focus in the TAILOR project is to create tools for tailoring patient documents, interactive patient instructions and medical information for patients and professionals. Tools for analysing health information related to heart illnesses and for tailoring information based on this are created during the project. In this project our part is a demo version of a user interface for creating and using tailored patient instructions and medical data. Our multidisciplinary students have many different responsibilities in this project. They are working on the user interfaces, use cases, documentation, testing and many other tasks. The project is operated using Scrum methodology. In this paper we will introduce the project in detail and describe the role of students in this design-build experience. We will start from the general structure of the degree programme and describe the role of design build experiences in the programme overall. Furthermore we will describe the challenges and student feedback on working in these kind of real world design-build projects.

Proceedings of the 13th International CDIO Conference in Calgary, Canada, June 18-22 2017