Abstract:

The Covid pandemic hit the world extremely hard in 2019–2020, and forced a vast amount of people to change their daily routines. The most visible and common change was an abrupt shift from on-site work at offices to working completely on-line from homes. The Covid-19 quarantines had a particularly strong impact on the long-term unemployed individuals, who were forced to stay away from their work activities centers, which increased their isolation from society, and affected their mental health. These customers of the work activities centers are often characterized by some level of mental or physical illnesses, and tend to have little or no digital skills, which both contributed negatively to the effect of the quarantine on their rehabilitation.

In order to make distant participation in work activities possible for their customers, the rehabilitative work activities center of the City of Helsinki made a decision to respond to this situation by establishing an easy-to-use and accessible learning platform that was targeted to fit the particular needs of the customers of the work activities centers. However, there were several open questions that needed to be resolved before a permanent platform could be established, e.g:
- Would a digital platform work as a feasible learning environment to offer a qualitative and participative alternative for the on-site rehabilitative activities?
- Could participative societal and activating guidance be conducted on a digital platform?
- What would be the pros and cons of using such a platform?

Between September 2022 and September 2023, more than 100 content creators (teachers) and 100 rehabilitative work customers (long-term unemployed) participated in the one year long pilot.

The objectives of the pilot were to:
(1) test the suitability of a digital platform to match the needs of rehabilitative work activities,
(2) to increase participants’ digital skills, and
(3) to define the requirements for a more permanent digital platform.

We utilized learning design as a method to create digital content. As the participating teachers had no prior experience in creating digital learning content, we also had to arrange training for them.

This paper will describe the structure of the piloting process. It explains the one-year-long process from defining the need for the service, all the way to the final procurement of the permanent platform. It also describes the identified challenges and successes that took place during the process, in addition to discussing the pros and cons of using such a digital platform.

References:
[1] Dirksen, Julie (2015). Design for How People Learn.
[2] IBIS Capital, Global e-Learning Investment Review, 2013
[3] B.R. Rill & M.M. Hämäläinen, The Art of Co-Creation, Palgrave Mcmillan, 2018
[4] OECD (2017), The OECD Handbook for Innovative Learning Environments, OECD, Publishing, Paris.
[5] V. Mustonen, K. Spilling, M. Bergström, Cook Book – Recipes for agile piloting, Helsinki: Forum Virium Helsinki, 2018

Keywords:

Piloting, learning platform, learning design, digital skills, Civic engagement, Societal participation.