Professor Kay Berkling from DHBW spent the whole week visiting Kuopio and Savonia. She wrote the following wonderful story about her experiences here.

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Kuopio is not just a city and Savonia is not just a university, these two are intertwined. Working, studying, living happens seamlessly, as the university is conveniently located near town, next to industry, connected to a vocational school, where students often have jobs, teachers live nearby, and evenings are so bright that after work if feels like you have an entire extra day to do sports, meet friends and be with family. The market place, beach promenade and outdoor training rooms are full of citizens of all ages, enjoying the great outdoors.

The world in May is just waiting to wake up fully and embrace water sports and it’s time to repair the boats that are waiting around the edges of the lake. The ice-ring has melted away to 98%, still visible enough that you can get an idea of what you missed when you come too late to enjoy the fantastic winter. Apparently, local dialects have many words for snow, rain and ice, so that you can be sure to have the correct expression for an ice-lake that won’t crack when you drive home across the lake to your island or go ice-fishing without your necklace-picks, used for crawling out of your lapse in judgement.

Colourful campus and feeling of coming home

“Great place to learn!” was the first sign I saw as I entered the building of Savonia University of Applied Science. Following pink floor stickers, my favourite colour, I was led into the hall and my eyes moved up to each of the floors, decorated from green, orange, pink, yellow to blue on the top. Students walked around in colourful outfits, denoting their profession (It’s a May 1^st thing, not Finish fashion, so I guess, I won’t be able to buy that incredible outfit I saw on the bus). We discussed the colours over dinner, a local fish soup that I will definitely order again next time I come, and apparently, music is pink and engineering is orange. I wonder now, whether these colours were there to wake us all up as we go to work or do they signify the many different Bachelors that are studying in these hallways, from dancing to nursing, tourism, engineering and business.

On the pink floor (yessss!!!!), I was invited into the halls that teachers live in when they are not in the classroom. It struck me how many different formats of rooms they had to choose from depending on current interaction requirement, single, double, remote, hybrid, with sofa, or chairs, I wanted to try out all of them. (Thankfully, over the five days of my visit, I believe, we actually met in at least five different settings, depending on our needs.) As I rounded the corner, there was a place to hang coats and change shoes.

It struck me how many different formats of rooms they had to choose from depending on current interaction requirement, single, double, remote, hybrid, with sofa, or chairs, I wanted to try out all of them.

How is this relevant you think? I can only imagine the wintertime here and the need to take off the -30C proof boots and replace them with some Birkenstock. But for me, it was more like the feeling of “coming home” and “getting comfortable” that made me love this idea. Adding to that was the “family” kitchen, decorated in pink and carnival loops. They probably do this all the time, I thought, or maybe it was the May 1^st week thing. Either way – I was entering a warm, fun place to hang out and say hi to people you would be getting to know quickly, if you started to work here. (Did you know that Savonia became the best place to work in Finland in 2023 for large companies? No wonder…)

Duality has many meanings

Like in the U.K., where life outside of work is also respected, the minutes of leisure were counted on one hand, as I was whisked in a minutely managed schedule from one team to the next with introductions, EU Project exchange, international office, didactics with digipeda, an afternoon dance performance by the music and dance school, a trip through Kuopio and the tower, a demo of the universal student advising platform digivisio, holding a talk on gamification with so much digitalisation that my brain got fried, a discussion with IT, a tour of the campus to see all the laboratories, a lunch in each of several cafeterias and before I knew it, we had the debriefing and it was all over.

My head is still spinning from all these impressions. I wish I had taken a picture of the auditorium that has been turned into a cafeteria. You can eat on stage or in each of the rows leading up higher and higher to the back all the way to the balcony from where you can then look down. The unbelievable imagination and just-do-it attitude of taking radical ideas to reality is super obvious, humans everywhere, filling every corner of a building, designed to accommodate all these personalities so casually, while tickling the explorer in us.

Savonia is applied and deeply integrated with industry in several ways.

Duality has many meanings. Here it means that you have two ways to study, at university or at the applied university. Savonia is applied and deeply integrated with industry in several ways. Firstly, many students here work and study at the same time, and secondly, teachers are cooperating with industry for projects and research and thirdly, the industry is integrated into the classroom through projects, guest speakers and teaching contracts. Apart from teaching, part of a teacher’s time is devoted to the department of research and innovation, or internationalisation. Where time is spent, depends not only on the needs of the university but also a teacher’s preferences.

The laboratories in the building are extensive, open, with glass walls, kindling curiosities. The hallways are homely, because you can use them freely, you can make a mess and live there, you have sofas and chairs and tables and working niches just about everywhere, students hanging out, in the lab, in front of it, futzing around with some machine, materials all over the place, showing off work, showing off a working area, while being busy with making stuff. There is quite a variety of labs to move around in. I felt like the jewellery students where working next to mechanical engineering and I got so inspired by that. My brain is a very unfortunate place where cross-connections and interdisciplinary ideas overwhelm itself (and others) when you give it half a chance. Imagine pink machines, with diamonds … ok never mind. I think I would have had two majors here just because I would have wanted to operate the heavy machinery as well as fashioning the ring of my dreams, because why WOULDN’T you!

Savonia has something that we did not have – DigiVisio

Small secret, I have four majors and a minor because I couldn’t narrow myself down during my undergraduate time at Syracuse University in upstate New York. I studied Political Science in my year abroad in France. As a result, I could petition to have the same class count towards a major in French and a minor in Political Science. I counted Math classes of the first two years toward an Engineering degree as well as a Math Major. Looking at skills as part of any degree was normal in the US (but nobody was crazy enough to do that sort of thing) and I graduated with twice the number of credits required for a Bachelor, as I added a fifth year (we normally have 4 years in a Bachelor) to finish all my degrees.

Why am I telling you this? Because for Europe, counting one learning opportunity several times, constitutes a paradigm shift.

Why am I telling you this? Because for Europe, counting one learning opportunity several times, constitutes a paradigm shift. Europe would have to rethink degrees in terms of skills instead of predefined curricula or hours spent. (Would you be able to get two degrees that share half the coursework? Would you accept half the coursework from a French Bachelor in the US towards a new degree in Teaching in Germany? Can you get a Microcredential and use it seamlessly towards a Bachelor degree? Can industry skills be counted towards a Bachelor degree? – The answer must be yes in all cases if you think in terms of skills.) Lifelong learning would not depend on a particular, arbitrary section of my life, but it would truly mean life long, defining a person as a learner since day one, graduating students in three years would not be a KPI of a university. (Another paradigm shift I will not tackle in this text, even if my fingers are itching to write about it.)

Savonia has something that we did not have back then. I had to fill out paper petitions with a list of signatures in order to have my classes from other institutions accounted for. You have DigiVisio. A person in Finland can log in and have a record of past coursework. In addition, they get recommendations and access to learning opportunities in Finland based on students’ profiles. Honestly? I am glad, I am not studying here. Imagine my brain on rails, having to decide with so many choices at my fingertips, yikes! (Here, I am counting on your East-Finland humour that I encountered this week.) 

For a student, it is an incredible support to plan a personalized learning path. Imagine what you can do with this. I am thinking of a sort of Tinder matching of skills between students and universities, between students and industry. Discussing these ideas within the digipeda group, we are spinning some more tall tales about going further. How about including student goals to find industry to match with? Now they can adopt-a-student even before they graduate, offer internships, compete for the students with the best company culture, offer project supervision, or cooperation on research, imagine being matched with a company you didn’t even know existed anywhere in Finland, or one day, around the world. Industry and academia will be intertwined like never before and you are basically there already, because the difficult part is already accomplished with an application like DigiVisio. Savonia has all the ingredients, digitalisation of learning opportunities, students and closeness to industry.

For a student, it is an incredible support to plan a personalized learning path.

Going back to building your skills, you should be able to take classes, or learning opportunities, in any major or university and apply them towards a degree you seek. This includes e-mobility across Europe for example. Imagine the app would go beyond Finland. I come from an applied science University and maybe I would love to see a business student from Savonia in the first part of my Software Engineering class just for the first part, where you can learn how to specify requirements that IT will then build for you. You could join my class online, in English with a teacher that is not strict, has a strange sense of humour and would allow you to define your own project rather than telling you what to do. You would be sitting next to computer science students from around the world, living in Germany but choosing to be online, maybe because they have family or want to do more sports and need more control over their time. The skills you take back to your home institution would be matched towards your personal bachelor path, all part of the potential app that DigiVisio could become in the future vision of how we learn.

Imagine, the next time you choose a class, you wouldn’t be just shopping for a class but for a teacher with a teaching style that matches your learning style and a project that matches you with industry and their culture. Some rethinking of the data schema to support new ways of mixing and matching skills with information about human personalities and dreams is just a small step away.

The happiest people in the world

Getting ready to step on a plane on my way back to my own university at DHBW Duale Hochschule Baden Württemberg, I feel so privileged to take with me all these colourful ideas, as well as some new samba and salsa steps from Monday night and impressions of hats on May 1, black melting ice, lots of forest, beaches with palm trees, work-out parks and a lot of happy Finish people. I think you deserve to be called the happiest people in the world and I will be dreaming of a large Moose stuck to my windshield, pink classrooms with stages for me to dance salsa, wearing a rainbow outfit (for my degrees in Politics, Maths, French, Teaching, Engineering, Computer Science) while being filmed and teachers listening to me from sofas, looking surprised when I tell them about elementary schools in Germany… but that is another story.