Students’ Perception of the Development of Generic Competencies in a User Innovation Course Context – A Longitudinal Study Comparing Different Teaching Modes in Higher Education

The development of generic competencies relevant to graduates lies at the heart of higher education. Generic competencies development is challenging in today’s VUCA – volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous – world, and the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this challenge as educators were forced to change from classroom to online teaching with very short notice. In this paper, we analyse how the change in teaching mode influences students’ perception of the development of their generic competencies. Our longitudinal data consists of five years of student feedback from a multidisciplinary and practice-oriented user innovation course in a higher education context. We analysed how students perceive their development of specific generic competencies and surprisingly found no statistical differences over the five years studied, not even when moving from blended teaching to a fully online seting. We discuss how the three underlying factors – 1) roots and premises, 2) freedom and independence, and 3) social connectedness and support – enhance the perceived development of generic competencies despite the change in teaching mode, and we conclude with suggestions to business educators.