The Future of Education

Educational systems around the world have been changing rapidly, with educational technology, funding arrangements and pedagogical innovations questioning many existing practices and setting a demanding agenda for the teaching staff to reinvent themselves as experts on both the content of what they teach and the efficiency of how they can organise their work.

Teaching is no longer seen as an individual’s activity. Terms such as collaborative teaching, co-teaching and other demonstrate an increased interest towards finding the right recipes to enable teaching staff to achieve more by working in teams. Haaga-Helia’s Porvoo Campus has been working on such a recipe - a new curriculum, launched in 2017, where organisational structures and distinctions between learning subjects have been removed to result in an unprecedented team teaching context. In the new curriculum, large staff teams are porous, self-organised and self-managed. Such teams work openly, transparently and co-create new contents with the industry partners and students.

This paper shares the elements of making such work environment possible: open office, collaborative platforms, horizontal organisational structures, student-centred learning activities, large modules defined by meta-competences, and other. At the same time, the paper highlights the challenges that exist in the transformation of a largely traditional work environment towards new styles of self-management and self-leadership in a knowledge society.