Learning with companies

The Learning with companies project (LeWiCo) is a three year long Nordplus Horizontal project that started up in 2012, with partners from Norway (Etterstad videregående skole and Høgskolen i Oslo og Akershus), Estonia (Voru Vocational Training Centre and the University of Tartu)and Finland (HAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Sciences/ School of Vocational Teacher Education and Porvoo Campus).

LeWiCo aims to benchmark and share good work-integrated practice, create collaborative implementations among institutions and trigger new ways for collaboration with companies – in short the goal is to enhance the work-integrated pedagogy among educational institutions and companies in a Nordic-Baltic context.

Exchanging good practices

A LeWiCo start-up meeting was held in October 2012, where the partners had invited guests and companies such as Mc Donalds, Helsinki Fair and Suomalainen kirjakauppa (Finnish bookstore). After the meeting it was decided to identify collaborating working life partners;Colorline (ferry line/spa, Norway), HAIKKO (hotel and spa, Finland), and Kubija (hotel and spa, Finland).

A LeWiCo partner spring seminar in March 2013, integrated with the international conference “Encounters13” that was held at the Porvoo Campus. During the spring seminar, three LeWiCo papers and three LeWiCo posters on work-integrated concepts and practices were presented.

“The LeWiCo project provides excellent opportunities to all partners to learn good practices from each other, and to understand the cultural, economic and legislative background of the working educational work-based learning systems”, says professor Hasso Kukemelk at the University of Tartu.

Next steps

In the autumn of 2013, joint implementation involving three companies and three educational institutions related to “Visuality in marketing and spas” will take place.

Two further meeting are planned in Estonia / Voru in 2013-2014.