Virtual Education at Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences
Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences is an institute of tertiary vocational education located in Finland in the north of Europe. The Kemi-Tornio region is situated on the southern rim of the northernmost province of Finland, and has traditionally been the gateway to Lapland. Thus the hinterland of Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences is the vast arctic wilderness of Finnish Lapland where villages are few and far between and the population numbers are declining. The long distances between schools in Lapland and their students in remote locations make the development of eLearning at the educational organisations in Lapland self-evident.
 Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences was the first Finnish university to offer a virtual education programme that leads to a degree. The crux of this education programme is that students can complete their studies entirely via distance studies with the help of the online environments, LearnLinc, the synchronous real-time platform that functions as a virtual classroom, and the asynchronous virtual learning environment, Moodle. This integrated model is called the eDegree programme.
Presently, all units of Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences offer one or more eDegree programmes to students around Finland and increasingly abroad. As of September 2008 there will be 30 groups with a total of about 660 students studying in various eDegree programmes where the amount of online studies varies from 100% in the degree programmes in Business and ICT, via 75% for social and healthcare studies to 50% in the engineering degree programmes. There is even a 100% online international eDegree programme leading to a Master’s Degree in International Business Management.
The strength of virtual education at Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences is the exploitation of combined synchronous and asynchronous educational technology coupled with close technical and pedagogical support for the participants. The LearnLinc online classroom is a client server system that allows real-time audio communication and resource sharing between teachers and students. The open source VLE Moodle is used for most of the learning tasks, quizzes, self-test exercises and other mostly asynchronous interaction. The integrated model was born out of the solid experience the university possesses in the field of eLearning. The institutes of higher education united in Kemi-Tornio UAS have developed their distance education effort since 1986 and the university is nowadays a significant producer and developer of virtual education. So much so that at least 80% of the teaching staff at the university executes virtual education in some kind of form.
One of the driving forces behind this development has been the eLearning Centre of Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences. It is the support service responsible for virtual teaching and learning at the university. Its essential tasks are technical and pedagogical support services for virtual education and learning as well as user training and management, VLE maintenance, support for educational content production and general development work. Presently, the eLearning Centre supports over 5500 active users in Moodle in some 1500 course environments and 5500 users of LearnLinc at a rate of some 8500 student-hours per month spent in the online classrooms. Still, the development of virtual learning at Kemi-Tornio UAS and its affiliated schools has not reached its pinnacle yet.
The development of virtual education as a part of an open learning environment is one of the strategic focus points of Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences. For several years new, virtual ways of teaching and learning have been researched and developed in various regional and international projects. Recently completed were the long-running projects ICT in Distance Education (LearnLinc project in Lapland) and the Development Project of Distance and Virtual Education of the Lappish universities (LEVIKE). An example of an ongoing project is the Support Cluster for Distance Education in Lapland, which seeks to extend and distribute the practice of close, real-time student and teacher support developed at Kemi-Tornio UAS to other institutes of secondary and tertiary education in Lapland. The aim is to achieve a centrally administered, distributed support team capable of lifting the eLearning effort in Lapland to the next level. Kemi-Tornio UAS also spearheads the development of regional eLearning efforts within the Provincial University of Lapland, which is a co-operative network of the universities of the province and the representatives from the sub-region in question.
At Kemi-Tornio University of Applied Sciences virtual education has increased steadily and, according to the statistics, in the year 2006, 10721 ECTS points were executed as virtual studies at the school. On a national level that put the school in the first position when it comes to the successful implementation of virtual studies. The expertise in eLearning at Kemi-Tornio UAS received international recognition when it was awarded the UNESCO King Hamad Bin Isa Al-Khalifa Prize for the Use of ICT in Education in December 2006. The award was given on account of the successful eDegree model created at the university.
For more information contact:
Marko Mehtälä
Project Leader Kemi-Tornio Polytechnic
+358 40 721 42 53
marko.mehtala@tokem.fi
or
Jimmy Georgiades
Parsec Infotech
Tel. +31 343 – 460 532
jimmyg@parsecinfo.nl |
