that include contact teaching, as well as the possibility
to borrow literature to support the teachers’
pedagogical understanding.
With the success of the UTUPS environment,
funding was applied for its continued development
and extension to other Finnish universities. In early
2017, the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture
gave funding to build a new system (titled UNIPS) for
8 Finnish partner Universities, based on the UTUPS
solution. The project is funded until 2020 and it
covers the costs of the technical development of the
platform and the creation of several new modules and
materials, and research of the solution.
The new UNIPS environment will share the same
pedagogical principles as UTUPS. It will be hosted
online, and the webpage will have password
authentication for those partner University staff
members who want to study the materials. What
separates it from SPOCs and MOOCs is that the main
priority in the website is to have categorised high
quality university pedagogical materials available,
and only the secondary goal is to offer guided studies
for those who want to get credits or certificates for
studying the materials.
In the becoming UNIPS solution of 8 universities,
each university will provide other universities with
materials for at least one module. The modules are,
however, developed in cooperation, i.e., in addition to
the university that is responsible for the module, there
will be at least two other universities participating in
the planning and developing of the module. The
individual partner universities will be locally
responsible for offering the guided studies with credit
points for their own students, but all content creators
will offer example guidelines to other universities on
how to organise them. These instructions will include,
for example, tips how to organise groups, what kind
of ideas can be evolved in the group discussions and
what would be the pitfalls to avoid in each module.
The choice not to include automatic evaluation
was made, because the created modules include
teamwork sessions and essays as ways to study, and
with current technology it is not possible to evaluate
an essay or group processes automatically with
sufficient quality. Yet, the platform allows the use of
interactive tasks which give immediate feedback to
the user. Additionally, some modules might be
constructed in the future so that all tasks are
automatically assessed. This is another thing we will
look into as we develop the UNIPS platform.
Another goal for the environment, which we will
keep in mind in the future, is the development and
offering of disciplinary specific courses. This has not
yet been realised, but the platform provides an
opportunity for that and we hope that in the future it
will be utilised in a way that gives teachers
possibilities to develop and organise courses on
specific disciplines or topics. Further work is also
needed in organising and assessing the disciplinary
specific courses on our website.
The UTUPS and the upcoming UNIPS solutions
have thus far been proven to be effective, well-liked
and cost-efficient in offering university pedagogical
staff development courses for university teacher,
other staff and doctoral students. The platforms will
be further developed on the principles described
above and new solutions will also be searched for.
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