Partner in the Spotlight: Odisee Co-Hogeschool Brussels
Since we are hosting our VisugXL conference at Odisee, we sat down with Kevin, program manager of the Bachelor in Applied Informatics and the Associate degrees Programming, System & Network Management at Odisee for our next interview.
Can you introduce yourself and what's your role at Odisee?
My name is Kevin and I’m the program manager of the Bachelor in Applied Informatics and the Associate degrees Programming, System & Network Management at the Odisee University college.
Brussels is my basecamp and my day-to-day mission is to connect lecturers, students and the workfield by professional education. I’m a fast multitasker and do my very best to make the energy I have contagious. Most of the time I’m a problem solver and team manager.
Next to designing curriculums, I use my degree to teach the 3rd year students how to become a real professional and help them in making the first steps towards an interesting workplace.
We’ll be hosting VisugXL at Odisee, thank you for helping out the community. Why did Odisee decide to organize the event at their location?
The world we live in is evolving every second. Our society is being changed fundamentally by the impact of the internet, connected economies and disruptive technologies.
Odisee strongly believes that a school should be anything but boring.
We challenge students in solving realistic problems while reflecting on the learning process. But also by using new technologies. No better place to discover these hot topics, than a conference. A nice bonus for our team is that by organising it at our location, they can all join and professionalize in the topics of their interest.
How are students currently learning new things? Are user groups on their radar?
Everyone can learn informatics these days; our goal is to train talent by high-quality academic education in diverse areas of informatics. We provide lessons and training in an online and on-campus setting.
Students integrate what they learned, every semester, in special ‘workfield courses’. First year students visit a big IT company in Belgium to stimulate them in unleashing their full potential. Second years, we stimulate by following at least one hackathon and give them pointers to interesting conferences. By real life ‘integration projects’ we prepare them in failing forward and for the agile way of working.
User groups were not on our and their radar. Good thing that changed.
When do you consider VisugXL a success?
When all visitors, including our students, get inspired and maybe discover new tools or platforms they can be good at. In the long run, I hope we can contribute to creating even more innovative solutions.
Can we come back next year? 😊
Thumbs up!
Thank you for your time Kevin!