Building partnership in Ghana for digitalizing thesis work in higher education institutions

During 25th and 30th September, Eduix and Haaga-Helia went to Ghana to visit and support our pilot projects in two universities: the Ghana Institute of Journalism and the University of Ghana.

Dr. Altti Lagstedt, principal lecturer at the Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences, wrote his impressions about the trip at the university blog:

What is remarkable for all these meetings and sessions was the clearly positive attitude towards education digitalization. The information gathered from focus group sessions and interviews show, that there clearly is a readiness for education digital transformation.

Dr. Altti Lagstedt

Such visits and pilots are part of the research project Eduditra, funded by Eduix.

Find out more about his conclusions on the trip in his blog post here.

Digitalizing research work and academic projects with Wihi

Continuously producing high quality research is a core activity of research centers, such as universities. However, managing such academic projects at the institutional level is still quite a challening task for everyone involved: students, supervisors and faculty coordinators.

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Eduix supports productive student-teacher research collaborations by digitalizing academic project and thesis processes

I was lucky in getting the right supervisor for my research

Finding and building a good relationship with the right research supervisor cannot be taken for granted in universities. Since I started my postgraduate studies in Finland, I’ve been constantly confronted with my colleagues’ quest on finding the right supervisor for their studies and research work. When I was accepted to do my Master Degree at the University of Eastern Finland, I wasn’t assigned any supervisor at that moment and I wasn’t assigned with the task of finding one for my Master thesis either. Just a few months after the Master Degree Program started, I was told who would be my supervisor and that was it. Back then, I didn’t question this decision for any moment because the supervisor I was assigned fit very well my research goals and expectations. Also, our previous class experiences gave us a good taste that we would work together as a student-supervisor very well. Since then I’ve had the same supervisor for my PhD studies as well. Later I realized that I was lucky.

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Open Science Schooling and the Project: Young Students as Critical Science Detectives

The current disengagement of science education at school

Students have been constantly reporting cognitive and affective disengagement with science learning (Cowie et al., 2011; Murray et al., 2004) due, among other factors, to a disconnection between school learning activities and young people lived experience.

At the same time, there is an increasing demand for science related professionals in Europe (CEDEFOP, 2016). Such unbalance between industry demand and school supply of youths pursuing scientific careers calls for innovative ways to re-engage students in science learning.

The Open Science Schooling Approach

To tackle the above mentioned issue, a consortium of educators, researchers, and students around Europe have deployed from January 2020 until March 2022 a transnational school project in Greece, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania. The project was built upon previous experiences developed through the Open Science Schooling (OSS) approach, in which …

students are active agents at the heart of inquiry-oriented science learning. In the OSS project, students identify and frame the research problems that they are intrigued and interested in tackling, and they lead the discovery of solutions and innovations, helping situate science in every-day life.

Leite & Montero, 2022, p. 5
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Eduix takes corporate and social responsibility seriously

Written by Sirpa Pajula and Laís Leite

Social responsibility encompasses all the company’s and employees’ activities towards people. From the closest co-worker to the farthest partner.

Sirpa Pajula

The foregoing description is the author’s own definition, Eduix’s manager of corporate responsibility. In order for it to “really work” in practice, it requires that a responsible mindset be built into the company’s operating culture.

Closeup of a woman's hands typing on a laptop that is on a wooden desk with a mobile smartphone and mouse computer
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Eduix challenges the software industry to take responsibility

Written by Sirpa Pajula

Corporate responsibility is the responsibility for a company’s social, economic and environmental impact. As a service company, Eduix’s corporate responsibility focuses on the social impact on people. The impact on people is reflected in the lifelong learning solutions that Eduix provides to its customers and users.

The core values of Eduix’s operations are responsibility, transparency and sustainability.

I feel privileged – responsibility is a strategic choice for Eduix, which is reflected in the goal setting and the strong support of the management. When I started as a Sustainability Development Manager six months ago, I found that Eduix’s operations were already exemplary in principle. The adverse effects of our own operations were minimized, and the responsibility for purchased energy and purchased products and services, as well as travel, was taken into account.

Sirpa Pajula

In the future, Eduix goal is to integrate responsibility as an integral part of its service processes, from user-oriented design, software production and customer service. Responsibility is not treated as a separate issue by different experts, but as an integral part of the activity.

I see the promotion of sustainable and resource-wise software production as the most challenging and in this software development field…

Sirpa Pajula

Eduix calls the whole industry to get involved and take into account this responsibility.

The Edupreneurs Recommendation Paper is out!

Our goal with this recommendation paper is to share the lessons learned from the project Edupreneurs: Networking and Empowering Education Entrepreneurs Towards a Resilient EdTech Ecosystem. The project was undertaked in Southern Africa, funded by the Southern Africa Innovation Support (SAIS 2) programme.

Edupreneurs Recommendation Paper
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Toni Ruusunen, full-stack developer

This time I talked with Toni Ruusunen about his work at Eduix. Toni is among other Eduix’s employees who used to work in another field and decided to explore the world of software development. Out of his own interest, self-regulated learning, and problem-solving skills, he developed his programming competences and ended up working with us.

Toni is from Tampere and he has a high school background, “ylioppilas” how it is called in Finnish. This means that Toni doesn’t have a formal computer science background. He used to work as a construction worker, especially as a painter. However, he got bored of working outside and sometimes in bad weather conditions. That was when he shifted his attention to an indoor type of work: programming, and he set his next professional goal.

Tampere, Toni’s hometown
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Technology implementation in your school

Academic peer reviewing is one of the best ways there is to boost learning: although it is hard sometimes, when you are lucky, you get to read a lot of rich, useful, informative, instructive, mind changing literature that your supervisors and peers failed to recommend for you before. And I’ve been learning so much with the recommendations of one of the reviewers from a manuscript recently submitted.

The reviewer suggested guidelines, models, and plans developed by the pioneers in the field of technology implementation in schools, back in the 1990s. Although the technology has changed in so many levels, their recommendations are still as relevant as before. In addition, it’s a great pleasure to go back in memory when we read references to CD players and digital encyclopedias that people could purchase with CDs and floppy disks. Ah those times…

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Minna Ilmén, project manager

As a starting point for the year 2022, I talked with Minna Ilmén, project manager at Eduix for 3 years now. It was a relaxing and fun conversation. This time, we travel to Akaa, a small village about 50km south from Tampere where Minna lives. She described her house as a small, cozy and old place in the middle of the woods, where she lives with her husband and two cats.

Akaa, where Minna lives.
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