Abstract:

Professional development is more crucial than ever, especially in supporting the ongoing digitalisation in the knowledge society. The need for upskilling and reskilling is described as continuous lifelong learning, which must be combined and synchronised with the lives of full-time working learners. Content, pedagogical models and instructional design in university courses are often created for students in Bachelor's and Master's programs instead of tailored for experienced professionals working full-time. One such course is the foundation for this study; a course on digitalisation and digital transformation targeting professionals with at least two years of work experience in digital transformation. Therefore, the research question that guided this study was: "How can a distance course for professionals be redesigned to facilitate lifelong learning?" The redesign aims to increase satisfaction with the course and the number of participants taking their exams.

The course contains four modules with synchronous and asynchronous learning activities, resulting in 5 ECTS. The analysed empirical material consists of course participants' check-in presentation before the course started, mid-term evaluation, final evaluation, and a learning diary containing 58 entries. The empirical material was inductively and iteratively analysed following the main steps of thematic analysis. Two of the researchers conducted the first steps of the analysis individually. The following steps were a joint coding procedure to reach consensus. This part of the analysis included several discussions with the other researchers. The inductive analysis identified 70 initial codes that reflected issues related to course design, learning activities, course information, and instructions. The initial codes were clustered into 17 more abstract themes based on similarities. The themes related to strengths with the course and challenges. The strengths were analysed as, among others, discussions with course participants in other domains, recordings introducing scientific articles, focused and direct instructions on the learning management system (LMS), and the course being held online at the same weekly time. Perceived challenges were, for example, reading scientific articles and understanding and transferring the content to their work situation, lack of correspondence among the modules, not all modules being published simultaneously on the LMS, and the general problem of mixing work and studies.

Despite that, the material showed satisfied course participants. Only a few ended the course by taking the exam to get their credits, which is one of academia’s ways to count learning. Based on the data analysis, course and learning activities will be redesigned and developed to be tested and evaluated in a forthcoming course in autumn 2023.

Keywords:

Lifelong learning, Professional development, Curriculum design, Course design, Technology-enhanced learning, Digital transformation, Learner satisfaction.