Smart City ASEAN Learning Network

Description

A major priority for the development of smart cities in South East Asia refers to the provision of personalized learning courses by educational institutions to help future workers gain the skills that are in demand. National and regional governments, HEIs and industry agree that current smart city initiatives need to be strengthened and furtherly funded. With the focus mainly on the (digital) urban infrastructure, the need for trained personnel goes largely unanswered. In the light of the above, addressing the skill readiness of current and prospective smart cities professionals through appropriate educational strategies and interventions is a matter of urgency in the quest for transforming Partner Countries’ cities into smart ones. Existing study programs should be enhanced and new ones have to be designed to meet the emerging skill demands of for sustainable smart city careers.

Conceptualized in this context SCALE envisages a portfolio of competence-based training modules for SSCs that can be viewed as micro courses able to complement and improve existing or synthesized to create new bachelor/MSc programs’ courses. Competence-based courses will foster innovation in higher education by applying a labor market-driven educational strategy, which will make the training offer more relevant with the actual labor market demands. The competence-based modules will also enable a highly flexible integration of emerging and innovative smart city elements into existing curricula, and support the acquisition of a rich variety of transferable, digital, green and smart city specific skills. Our main vision is to create a novel form of learning, which we term incubative learning. Encapsulating the smart city training modules into well-established curricula will provide the ability to tailor training schemes for building the missing competences or extending already acquired competences to cover smart cities.