Abstract:

The Digitalisation has rapidly developed into one of the main drivers of change in higher education (HE) and language learning in Finland. There are multiple ministry-funded national projects that have been initiated to support this development. One of them is DIGIJOUJOU, that is just about to end after two years’ work. The main aim was to develop digipedagogy and digimaterial for teaching Finnish and Swedish (both official national languages in Finland) to be utilised both at universities and universities of applied sciences. In so being, the whole higher education area (HEA) was working together over the university boundaries. The material is licenced with Creative Commons so it can be used and edited anywhere for not-commercial purposes.

DIGIJOUJOU divided into multiple sub-projects and we worked in a sub-project which developed study modules for a 3 - 5 ECTS of independent studying. The beta-version of the modules was piloted in spring term 2019. In Aalto University we created, by using the material produced in the project, an online course Finnish for professional needs (3 ECTS, CEFR level B1/B2) as a pilot course. It was meant only for the students of Aalto University, but according to the experiences of the pilot course we are now developing the course to be offered on DigiCampus platform for all HE students in Finland in Autumn term 2019.

In this oral presentation, we introduce some highlights of the developing of the course Finnish for professional needs from the pilot course to the final version. As many of the problematic issues in pilot course seemed to be related to the presence of the teacher (or lack of it), the focus is in reflecting how and why to improve teacher’s presence in the course. The remarks of the pilot course showed that it affects i.e. to students’ motivation and engagement, so it’s very essential aim of developing. We will discuss about the ways a teacher can be present in an online course as a visible guide and facilitator. We will also share some solutions made in developing this specific course.

Finally, we will introduce the results of the student satisfaction survey that will be collected after the first round of the developed course Finnish for professional needs in its final form in Autumn 2019. We will evaluate the results from the perspective of the developing teacher’s presence.

Keywords:

Digitalisation, online language learning, higher education, teacher’s presence.