Dr. Rissanen addresses education possibilities and global awareness

Text and picture: Eero Lassila

"It's great to have the conference here in Turku. It reveals that we have active Finnish universities with connections to the CDIO network. It tells about the will to function globally and about the development of the world's best engineering education what comes to the pedagogical method used by us. CDIO has practical and theoretical insight and our main goal is to help students reach better results. Our students actually do things besides just learning the theory. That's really something because it summarises the best elements of the education", Rissanen says.

Riitta Rissanen has been attending conferences as Guest Lecturer concerning e.g. education, innovation and higher education problems. She has a couple of points to make.

"Engineers should be more global because it's the necessity of today's market."

"The main issue is going to be the meaning of the learning platform and what education has to offer to engineering students, compared to other ways of learning. I speak about the context of learning and Mode 2 information production. It's a creative solution containing a mix of different sciences, for example physics, medicine and design and the skills are used to solve real-life problems."

"I'm also going to raise the issue of our characteristics and the strengths of universities of applied sciences. In addition, I will address the relationship between pedagogy and working life, which is really the core of CDIO."

CDIO has participants from over 20 countries.

"CDIO promotes international teamwork which is a big development challenge for us. Engineers should be more active globally because it's a necessity in the market today. That means that university education must be unified to make it equal in all universities."