Category: Societal impact through WIL

WIL as a tool for work-life relevance in Norway

How Work-integrated learning (WIL) is understood and used in higher education varies. This variation is often context-dependent, and therefore the development of WIL is interesting to follow in different contexts. A recent opinion piece from Norway discusses the well-known (in Norway) importance of work-life relevance in higher education and how higher education institutions fail to […]

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Work-integrated learning in action – How do women entrepreneurs in small businesses learn and develop digital skills?

Entrepreneurship and innovation are the main local, regional, national, and international development drivers. However, there are gender differences as a majority of entrepreneurs all over the world are men. This gap has generated research interest and different perspectives have been studied and analyzed. Contemporary digitalization of society affects all sectors and industries generating possibilities and […]

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Work-integrated learning and engaged scholarship: Bringing universities closer to the real world

Universities are critiqued for being irrelevant and not contributing to solving real-world problems. Work-integrated learning (WIL) and engaged scholarship are ways to bring universities closer to practice and communities. When reflecting on what it means to engage with society as an academic, there are several potential paths to consider. Through our research collaboration, we reflected […]

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The problem with WIL is that it’s basically quite easy, and this is hard to understand

The starting point for the reflections on WIL in this blog post is the idea that what makes WIL – here defined as a strategy for developing new and useful knowledge in-between people with different competences and interests – difficult is that it basically deals with something very simple. In order for collaborations between academics […]

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おはようGood morning!

It is 3 am and I am sitting in my living room, listening to the session “Experiences from CEWIL Canada, WIL and ACEN” at the WACE (World Association of Co-operative Education) conference. The three acronyms hold three giant networks focusing on work integrated learning around the globe. The conference should have been held in Kanazawa, […]

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WIL Reflections…it’s alive! 

Welcome to University West’s research blog about Work integrated Learning (WIL). Through the blog, we want to actively stimulate a theoretically grounded and critical discussion about how WIL can be understood as a multifaceted phenomenon, concept, or research area. We envision that such a discussion will illustrate and develop the core and the elasticity of […]

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