Innovation in Language Learning

The current generation of students lives in a VUCA world. This means that learning must adapt to these ongoing challenges. As developments follow each other rapidly, they create a volatile environment. Despite the abundance of data, these developments are often unpredictable and remain uncertain. Furthermore, societal and professional challenges are often significant and complex, comprising many intertwined components, unknown aspects, and often having a substantial impact and profound consequences that affect many people, both directly and indirectly, in ambiguous ways. Blended Intensive Programmes (BIPs) offer a short, innovative and intensive curriculum designed to enable students to address selected topics predominantly in an interdisciplinary setting and are one way of meeting these challenges in tertiary education. This approach considers the selected topic as a system — a sum of problems that is greater than the sum of its parts, and that is directly interrelated. Consequently, students, lecturers, and external professionals from various fields must collaborate to generate new knowledge. This contribution describes the preparatory steps, the execution and the results of a sequence of BIPs in the fields of architecture, economics and innovation studies, and their impact on lifelong learning, as a reference example. The first part reflects on content development, administrative, and organisational aspects, as well as on their impact on curricular classes. The second part of the discussion addresses the execution, its challenges, and the evaluation components for the further programme development.