Abstract:

The world of work is changing rapidly. The ever-developing technology is changing the way we work and do business. Platform economy and consumer behaviors in using new services are tearing many traditional industries apart. Creative destruction is eating away those companies who are not able to renew themselves. At the same time, competence needs and professions change, and we can no longer fare through our careers on an education or degree we once obtained, instead, we all need to renew ourselves and update our competences.

In 2021, a renewal of the Finnish higher education legislation presented the Finnish universities of applied sciences with a new task: Continuous learning. In theory, this was not a new task as all Finnish higher education institutions (HEI) had been offering further education in various ways and formats for years already. In practice, the new task calls for a fundamental change in our way of thinking. Educating degree students is a familiar task for HEIs, but incorporating continuous learning students, a heterogeneous group of consumers, who have very varying profiles, is something new. These learners would come to require completely new services and learning design from HEIs. The trends influencing this are consumerization, omnipresence of services, and ease of use everywhere.

The need for renewing Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences was obvious, and the timing was right. The drivers for change were technological development, change of work, needs for learning new competences (number of learners and competence needs) and lengthening of careers, and these all created the frame and the demand for Haaga-helia to become a meeting place for continuous learning.

From the start, it was obvious that the learning offering, i.e. the curriculum, should be commensurate for Haaga-Helia’s modern service industries and dynamically updating. At the same time, it would need to serve the needs of both degree students and learners who were joining to update their skills and competences. Finally, the curriculum had to be flexible in a manner that allows students to build an individual degree and learning portfolio.

In a world where resources are increasingly scarce, renewal also calls for rethinking: how could we do things smarter? Despite this, our aim was not to become more efficient economically, but rather to stay abreast with the changing world and to respond to the needs this change brings along in an agile manner.

In this article we present an academic renewal, the biggest development and change project ever to have taken place in Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences. The change was extensive and spanned over multiple years. The objectives of the academic renewal were crystallized as observations of the changing operating environment. An earlier version of this article was already published in Finnish (Hiillos & Huttunen, 2022). In this article, we extend our discussion to initial experience from the renewal as well as areas where we have found room for improvement.

Keywords:

Curriculum, continuous learning, adult learner, learner-centered curriculum.