Digital transformation is changing higher education – innovative solutions and digital pedagogy are created in international cooperation

“Digital teaching will not replace contact teaching. Instead, it will complement and support it,” says Antti Karttunen from Aalto University. In the Virtual Materials Chemistry Laboratories for Sustainable Energy Solutions (VISUENERGY) project coordinated by Karttunen, virtual chemistry laboratories were developed for teaching sustainable energy solutions. Working in a physical laboratory is essential for the student’s competence in chemistry, but a digital learning environment supports practising and prepares students for lessons. Virtual laboratories are now used in the instruction of chemistry at Aalto University. They have been in wider use, for example, in the school world and applied to different fields both at Aalto and other universities. In the project, especially the usability of the materials was discussed and attention was paid to different learners. 

In the Promoting Digital Learning in STEM Subjects (DigiSTEM) project of Tampere University of Applied Sciences, the digital and pedagogical skills of teachers of STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) were developed and digital learning resources were created. Learning materials and two online courses were produced as a result of the project. The mobility periods included in the project enabled teachers to test and develop the outputs of the project. Kirsi-Maria Rinneheimo, the coordinator of the project, says that “combining technologies, content and pedagogy in a meaningful way was central to the project: attention was paid the student's self-regulation and studying at home, and group work and collaborative learning were activated and strengthened”.

Contrary to what one might think, digitalisation may also help to personalise teaching. In the project Personalized project management learning with chatbots (ChatLearn) of the University of Oulu, an AI-based teaching chatbot was created to support the teaching of project management to students of industrial management. According to Hannele Lampela, the project manager of this project, the chatbot frees up teachers’ time on courses with a large number of students, but what was essential in the project was to support independent and student-oriented teaching. This way, the project supports different kinds of learners in learning important working life skills. Students were involved in the development of the chatbot, and the feedback was extremely positive. The outputs of the project can be widely used for studying project management skills in different disciplines. Pedagogical guidelines for using chatbots in teaching were also created. The building of the chatbot was based on earlier cooperation with IBM but during the project, ChatGPT was also included. The chatbot has been further developed after the end of the project, and a fully agent-based model is already in use at the University of Oulu.

Digitalisation and AI challenge us to rethink education

All these three projects have carried out groundbreaking work by creating entirely new digital learning materials and developing digital pedagogy. The key has been to combine digital tools with pedagogical development: teachers’ digital and digipedagogical competence has been promoted and attention has been paid to students’ different starting points and ways of learning new things. Digital skills will also be essential skills for students in the future working life. The materials of all three projects are openly available for use.

The projects all agreed that international cooperation provides additional value to development. “Cooperation generates new ideas,” says Karttunen and continues: “Even though digitalisation is advanced in Finland, partners from different countries provide the project with other competences. International cooperation also helps to pay attention to diversity in the operating environments. Cooperation often continues in the same networks and new projects.  “The shared goal of developing teaching connects people and it is valuable that the results can be used across national borders,” Rinneheimo says.

According to the project actors, what they have learned most from in the projects is international cooperation and the development of the pedagogical point of view. 

During the project period, ChatGPT was also published in November 2022. This caused challenges on the one hand but provided new, inspiring things to do on the other. For the ChatLearn project, this was “a stroke of luck”, and the new technology was also included in the experiments carried out in the project. “It would be important to boldly try new tools, such as AI, in education. This frees up time for activities in which technology is not so good, such as interaction with students. Artificial intelligence will not replace the teacher, but it can support individual and communal teaching,” says Lampela. 

AI was also included the DigiSTEM project towards the end of the project, and information on the use of AI in teaching and its ethical aspects were added to the materials. “Digital tools, including AI, are used a lot, but how do we use them in a pedagogically meaningful way?” Rinneheimo continues. 

Over the past few years, ChatGPT has developed fast and become part of education and working life. Lampela says: “We at higher education institutions should communicate to all areas of society that AI is just one tool changing our ways of working.  In working life, we should now reflect on how effectively and responsibly we will take advantage of AI: which tasks will be automated, which will be divided, and which tasks are those that we do not want to use AI for. As yet, this has not been discussed on a large scale.” 

Text: Jasmin Kallio