Challenges and methods of the 21st century in logistics education

Abstract

In the 21st century teachers have to face a number of expectations and challenges coming both from the customers of education services (i.e. students and the potential employers) as well as from the regulatory bodies of the service provider side (school management, governmental organizations). Teachers must meet these expectations in a constantly and rapidly changing economic, social and informational environment. In this complex and heavily interconnected / interdependent world education should focus on developing capabilities (sometimes called soft skills) like critical thinking, communication and handling complex social situations. In addition to these general skills, potential logistics experts also should be able to think in systems, be accurate, flexible, cooperate with other functions, etc. In schools the “digital immigrants” (teachers) usually cooperate with the “digital natives”1 (students belonging to generations Y2 and Z3 ) to develop the desired skills and competences. The spread of Internet and e-learning platforms can facilitate this development process through the selection and combination of the adequate educational methods. In our research, we asked students belonging to generations Y and Z studying any fields of logistics about their perception of cooperative learning. The result will enable us to learn about the experiences and opinions of the students of cooperative educational methods. Our research compared the usefulness of different methods as perceived by students to how they are rated in the literature.