My best work experience - Digital Business study module at Laurea University of Applied Sciences

One year ago when we started our pilot course on Digital Business Models at Laurea, my wonderful colleague Ilkka Kurkela asked "What happens when you combine a group of innovative students, two passionate lecturers and tons of crazy ideas? The answer was "an awesome course"! :-)

Now after our first implementation of a Digital Business study module (30 ECTS) I'm asking - what happens when you combine a very big group of innovative, creative students, two passionate lecturers, over 20 outstanding guest speakers and tons of crazy ideas? :D

This course was simply super amazing! Just see yourself :-)

These days it is not enough to have a traditional literacy of reading and writing. We are expected to have digital skills which are essential for success in the workplace. We need to know how to find, sort, manage, evaluate and create information in digital forms. The significant trends that business managers need to understand and manage are social media, media computing, the internet of things, cloud computing and big data, just to mention a few. 

I'm sure that everyone who participated in the course actively has learned a lot. At least I did! :-) 

The most important learning for me as a lecturer was in order to be successful and creative in today's world you have to be ready to move out of your comfort zone. Both the students and the lecturers experienced ups and downs during the course, but I'm sure we all feel like winners today. At the beginning our Finnish students were quite reluctant to use English language, write a blog and speak in front of the class and a video camera, but after some time they have done all those very naturally. Their presentation, language and digital skills developed a lot during the course. 

The course consisted of personal branding, communication and cultural skills, digital sales, content marketing and social media, blogging, website essentials, law issues, cloud computing and other various themes and tools for digital business. We also had our hashtag #DigiSmallTalk

Social media platforms were widely used and we all practiced digital tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Blogger, Prezi, Google Drive, Linked-in, Vimeo, Video-maker, GoAnimate, Snapchat and last but not least we were one of the first (if not the first) university in Finland which practiced live streaming in Periscope. :)

70 students attending the course created their blogs where during 12 weeks of the course they were sharing their learning experience. 

Here are some blogs by the students

Nelli Laurila	Way to the digital
Mira Niemi	Learning in digital world
Camilla Fagerström	Digi Cami
Linda Knuutila	Linda's digi life
Tanja Heikkinen	Digital business
Hannah King	Hannahs digitalla
Lasse Lehtisalo	Digital business blog
Laura Laukka	Laura's digi vision

The students have also made many nice videos :-)

  
https://youtu.be/OPUdJnVLbLI

How to make a video

  

Blogging lesson

  

Here's one example of the social media marketing, Christmas campaign. Students' tasks were keywords analysis, creating content marketing for Facebook and a company blog, pictures, videos, etc.

https://www.facebook.com/lacyboxgifts/?fref=ts

Blog

http://lacybox.com/blogs/lacybox-blog/62238405-4-reasons-to-buy-her-a-subscription-to-lacy-box-this-christmas

and videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ-rr95xQGM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2idaFNyb28

and here's another example of the marketing tasks. The students created landing pages for the company Urakkamaailma Oy. :-)

click on the picture to enlarge
http://www.urakkamaailma.fi/siirtolapuutarhamokki

We all were working hard, but we still had a lot of fun. :D




And we had our final celebration "graduation" party

 Lecturers with the digital coaches

Remember to check our Facebook page.


and here is Ilkka's blog and his thoughts about the course. Yes, making dreams come true!  


All photographs by Faysal Hasan.