EIT Health's BRIDGE Summer School turns teaching around
Students in Copenhagen, Sweden and The Netherlands attend 'flipped classroom'
In the second week of August, 20 students from all over the world met in the Copenhagen campus at University of Copenhagen to devise digital solutions for senior citizens with Type2 diabetes, a lifestyle-related condition, as the EIT Health Campus BRIDGE course got underway.
Instead of traditional “lecture-like” teaching, the students worked closely together with patients, companies and public partners in the class room on patient-oriented solutions. The “flipped classroom” teaching method creates a learning environment where the students are faced with devising good solutions for an ageing society. Instead of giving traditional lectures, the instructors function as facilitators. The students do group work and are trained to translate health challenges into innovation targeted at the patients’ needs.
'We want to take the students out of their comfort zones, making them think out of the box and hopefully discover brand new ways of thinking treatment and prevention in cooperation with partners from both public and private organisations,' said Professor Rudi Westendorp from the Center for Healthy Aging at the University of Copenhagen. 'The international network of EIT Health makes it possible for us to share our experiences with the flipped classroom with other universities, and to offer our students an international environment. Therefore, this year we have started cooperating with several strong partners, including Erasmus University Rotterdam and Uppsala University, who can contribute to our success from last year and further help us bridge the divide between society, researchers and industry.'
The Coopenhagen training was part the overall training being provided by the EIT Health Campus Summer School called Bridging innovation, didactics, faculty, students and enterprise (BRIDGE). Sessions of the school were also held in Sweden and The Netherlands.
The Coopenhagen training brought together a range of EIT Health partners and others, including The Center for Healthy Aging at the University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen Business School, Novo Nordisk and Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen.
'The EIT Health Summer School represents an excellent forum for cooperation, where we can give the international students a greater understanding of the challenges of living within diabetes. It is a great opportunity for us to meet enterprising students, who may contribute with innovative ideas and inventions and help us to discover new ways of helping people with diabetes. At the same time, it is an opportunity to cooperate with some of the students on the further development of their ideas and thus increase our international network,' said Ulla Bjerre-Christensen from Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen, Capital Region of Denmark.
Senior Adviser Bo Wesley, from Cities Changing Diabetes, added: 'It is a unique opportunity to plant a holistic approach to devising solutions before they go out and find work in the healthcare system, in public health initiatives or in health-related companies.'
Read more about the University of Copenhagen lecture here.
Find out more about the EIT Health Campus BRIDGE Summer School here.
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