Students at Laurea University are taught that Learning by Development is the pedagogical choice at Laurea University. To me this means that students learn in practice and by participating in existing projects and learning from them. For me LbD is also very close tp learning by doing. The main idea here is that practice makes a champion. Perhaps, when doing something one might also realize that it could be done differently. It the turns out to be developing.
Students, that participate in this online course should realize that they are also participating in a longer period development project. The aim of this project is to change the way we learn and to develop the Digital University of the future.
For me this has been an ongoing process since 2011.
We first stated with online courses with my colleagues at the Laurea Kerava campus in c 2011. From this first step, we moved on to a bachelor program completely online in 2012 to c. 2015.
We then realized and learnt, that if all the students are online, we teachers do not need to be physically at the campus. We moved to a bigger campus and finally two years later our original campus was closed down. In the articles I have written and which have been published, one of the recurring themes is that several existing structures of our university system in Finland prevents change and in particular the emergence of a digital university.
In 2014 to 2016 I experimented combining this course with physical presence. Funded by the Nordplus program students from Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia and Sweden participated on the course and then travelled to a joint location on consecutive years (Helsinki, Reykjavik, Riga) for an intensive experience visiting local companies and learning new digital business models.In Reykjavik for example we visited the game company CCP Games known for the game Eve Online.
From this experience one of the key learning has been that future learning should be a combination of both digital and physical learning. All learning should not be online. Some courses can benefit from the scalability of online and the diversity of the participants in online courses. I also learnt that granting access to the propriatary learning platform to outside students (in particular to students from Iceland with an alphabet we do not have) is in practice almost impossible. For this reason I have been allowed to experiment with an online learning platform (eliademy) which is independent and not part of the university system. This experimentation has led to creating my own landing page, a site from which all my courses are visible and from which they can accessed and enrolled to any time. Unfortunatelu this has not yet transformed the university course enrollment process. University courses are open for enrollment c6 to 7 weeks during the year.
This course has also been available during the summer to all the students of all the universities of applied universities of science in Finland. The course was first available through summersemester.fi, which was during the summer only. Now it has been available through campusonline.fi. I have been happy to see that campusonline.fi has emerged as a part of the eAMK project and has expanded to offer c 500 courses both in the Spring Summer and Autumn. It remains to be seen will campusonline.fi, which has enjoyed great success among the students, continue after the eAMK project is terminated.
In November 2017 I was two weeks in India New Delhi teaching this course in the classroom. I invited my classroom students to enroll on to the platform to have access to the material, to complete assignments and to review what had been discussed in class. In the spring of 2020 I hope to visit Chile, teach the course and invite students to the platform. In this way I am building an internationilazation platform for students in Finland who do not wish to stay abroad during their studies. I am also hoping and promoting students to create study groups throughout Finland. I would be happy to meet these study groups either online or physically should I happen to be visting the location-
My online experiments have also reached beyond this course. In November and December 2019 we are going through an experiment with 500 students from 8 universities around the world. The course is completely online and it has been interesting to see how as a teacher I participate in a team of teachers to create a scalable learning experience to the students.
As a student of this course I welcome your feedback. Please be aware that you are participating in building the future of our universities, the digital university of the future.One of the most interesting and difficult challnges is that traditionally education in Finland has been free.
Since Autumn of 2019 I have together with my colleagues created an online master degree programme in english. I have realized (learnt) that anyone in the ETA area (a market of 500 million inhabitants) might want to participate in the program. This leads to an interesting and provocatice question. Should the finnish tax payer also pay for the learning experience of a person who never vists Finland. Change is never simple.
This is not just a course on theory. This is also a course on putting things into practice.
There are a few future directions this course might take.
Structures
I have found both that
- existing structures can prevent new services from emerging, but also
- new emerging structures and in particular new eServices provided by the society can change the way we organize our lives (e.g. health care services omakanta)
Tools
In the information society tools will help us both perform our tasks but also learn through tools. Microsoft has long been around with word and excel, but new tools are merging and an eye should be kept open to identify the best with which to get a grasp for ne concepts
The Digital Landscape 