A novel blended learning course developed jointly between three universities to address competence development of professionals in digitalized manufacturing

New competences and knowledge needs arises as manufacturing industry evolves and becomes increasingly digitalized. Facing this transformation, one of the challenges is the continuous and growing need for novel initiatives for competence development.The case portrayed here stems from a Swedish cross-university project aiming to jointly develop and offer courses for competence development of professionals in the manufacturing and IT sectors. The ambition is to increase the impact of the universities' respective efforts of meeting industry competence needs, where the continuous digital transformation entails that employees must develop or even change their qualifications. The case outlined focus co-production of a joint course package, at master level, between three universities and their respective company networks. Participating universities have long traditions in working closely with companies in research and education, where approaches for co-production have evolved over time. We make use of our joint understanding of the manufacturing industry's specific competence needs and our experiences of sustainable course formats for participants working full time.The joint course covers aspects of a manufacturing company on three levels: plant level i.e. material and production flows, cell level e.g. robotic simulation and visualisation, and system level i.e. data acquisition and monitoring through sensors. Each university is developing a course module of 2.5 ECTS, addressing a level respectively of their specialist competence. Participants are to complete assignments for each course module, i.e. for all three manufacturing levels, where the previous assignment provides an input to the next level, enabling the participants to encompass a holistic view of a manufacturing system. Participants need to combine study and work and at the same time they wish to extend their network, hence we are adopting a blended learning approach, where virtual labs and web conferences are mix