The Future of Education

The paper will report about a current process of curriculum design in Porvoo Campus (Haaga-Helia, Finland) led by a group of staff members and supported by an active involvement of the students, industry partners, and other stakeholders. This curriculum project, Campus 2.0, in a form of an action research, brings a number of innovative pedagogical and administrative initiatives into a more unified, simplified, resilient and efficient framework.

The paper will outline how such curriculum design process can be initiated, planned and implemented with several benefits, namely staff engagement, student empowerment, and internationalisation. The paper will also show how project management and service design can be used as tools to support the process.  

The paper will share the main outcomes of the process, including 1) a module based unified curriculum for all degree programmes offered on Porvoo Campus; 2) a transformation of basic level language studies into areal studies; 3) an integration of communication and advanced language courses with content subjects within modules; 4) and an overhaul of the traditional subject-based curriculum towards a new curriculum that is defined by competence pillars, i.e. competences that are relevant in work-life, such as global mindset, business and entrepreneurial acumen, the “right” attitude, employee advocacy, and other. 

The paper will also reflect on how complex and challenging such process can be in an educational institution, and what university staff and management can do with the help of change management tools to adjust and to enable each other towards uninterrupted innovation of their work.