How to complete the course
Please think of this web site as ”an online book” or a material repository. It is not an online learning system. Presently it does not contain tasks, quizzes, discussion forums etc.
A course can be built from this material by using e.g. free online tools. In the spring of 2020, I will be using this material in combination with mainly open online tools e.g. slack.com, googledrive and zoom (a video classroom) to communicate with my students.
If you are one of my students, you should have registered either through Laurea (my home institution) or through campusonline.fi – the common portal of applied universities of sciences in Finland. If you are one of my students, you should have received an email with further instructions on which tools to use and how to complete the course. If in doubt, please contact me by email.
If you are a teacher seeking to teach this material or parts of it, you are very welcome to use this material repository. Here are some tips on what you could do.
– you could take one of the chapters as a topic students could discuss in class (or a video session). At the end of each chapter (or hopefully most chapters), I have a reference list with books and articles for further reading.
– you could also ask students to build quizzes (multiple choice questions) around one, few or all the chapters and implement the quiz on tools like Kahoot.
– One of the tasks for completing the course, I have often given to my students, is to pick a case company facing digital tranformation or a company active in the digital revolution, pick five ”theories” (concepts) introduced in the material, describe the particular theory in your own words and show how the parrticular company is applying the theory.
During the summer of 2020 this course will be available through Laurea and campusonline.fi and I will be using a more sophisticated online learning platform canvas.com (in use at Laurea) to provide hopefully a more integrated learning experience with tasks, quizzes, reading material, discussion boards etc
The challenge of a business model and openness, my experience
Online courses are reshaping the way we educate ourselves.This website is an example of what can be done (what I can do) with open education.
I am a teacher of business and in particular I teach internet business models. I should know how to make money with a course in this (the internet) environment. Or to use more diplomatic and academic wording: ”how to create and capture value”. It is not easy. Here is what I have learnt through trial and error. I encourage you to experiment and learn in your respective context
I started off with the question of open education. In Finland we proud ourselves about our education policy and environment. Education is free to all and we say that it is open to all.
However, I realized that I was working in a propriatory online learning environment. It was not an open environment anyone could enter into. Access was behind passwords. I started experimenting. Also the reality, at the time was, that our online leaarning platform at my university, was getting old and technically out of date
I found the online platform eliademy.com. I was happy that my university supported the experimentation and also had an account on the platform. I was able to create a course that at best had around 100 to 200 participants per implementation. I was even able to make the course open for anyone to register into the course. These students could come from anywhere. They need not have been students from my university. However every time the course started, I had to market the new course address.
I noticed the online learning platform eliademy.com had a landing page feature. This feature allowed me to have one page, one address, which I would market. When I started the new course, I would just update the course to my landing page.
To be able to have a landing page I needed to create my own private account. I started with a free account. This, the freemium model, is a very common way to get new users to use a platform. I quickly noticed that my courses had advertisements. I realized that different students would be getting different type of advertising based on their own profile. I had to make it clear to the students, that I am receiving no income from the advertisemnts.
One day, on my site, I had a Tinder advertisement. I decided I need to do something about this. I also became more oncerned of the advertising the students might be receiving. I moved from a free account with advertisements to a premium account with no advertisements. My understanding was that with a premium account also participants to my courses i.e. my students, would not be receiving advertising. An annual account was available for 60 Euro´s per year
The landing page would allow me to market the course through online marketing opportunities and test and follow driving traffic to this particular site. I could have done some test marketing to learn how to do marketing. I did not have a price for my course. I did not know how to monetize ”a learning experience”. Or even if, I had some idea, I would not wish to go into conflict with my employer, the university. The question therefore was, why would I market something that brings me no revenue? I did not go to experiment with marketing.
At the end of 2019 eliademy.com went bankrupt. I do not know what happened, but perhaps even thousands of teachers paying 60 Euro´s annually was not enough to sustain the platform. Most of these teachers were facing the same predicament, they did not know how to monetize their teaching. Hence the story of eliademy.com came to a very unfortunate end.
This left me in a difficult situation. I had more than a hundred students just finnishing their course. Luckily I had reviewed most of the assignments and was able to inform the students of the difficulties with the platform. However I had to get my material quickly on to a new platform.
I had earlier created a web site using a wordpresss account. I activated this web site and got a new url villesaarikoski.com and uploaded my content from eliademy, which I had saved as html pages, to this new site. After some time I realized that the web site lacked many of the features of a good online learning system and resembled more a material repository. I decided to profile the site more as a repository and try and find other tools on the internet with which to conduct a class.
On March the 17th Finland closes down, because of covid19 virus. All universities shut their doors. In one day, in one leap, the universities turn to online education. I realize, that in a country, which has traditionally valued open education, I might be the only one in my university who has some of his educational content on an open web site available to all
I encourage feedback both on mistakes I most probably have in the content. I welcome suggestions on material that I could teach.I also welcome suggestions and opportunities to collaborate and work together
One of my future goals is to seek how I could teach this subject as part of a collaboration with the industry. I am slo looking into how I could develop and move forward with the online learning platform I have.
The Digital Landscape 