News 
The beta stage of the higher education institutions’ joint Opin.fi service generated thousands of user experiences and hundreds of pieces of feedback that will guide the further development of the service and the preparations for its launch.
The beta stage of the Opin.fi service ran in autumn 2024, with the aim of getting initial user experiences and feedback before the actual launch. The service was still under development in the autumn, and the study offering was limited to the first eight higher education institutions. In addition, accessing the service required a password. In less than three months, the service had more than 13,000 visitors, and feedback was received from approximately 800 learners and representatives of higher education institutions.
All in all, the beta stage of the Opin.fi service was successful: targets were exceeded and there were no major technical problems. The greatest gain was in the feedback and user experiences that will support the launch of the service in April 2025 and the further development of the service.
Read more about the lessons learned in the beta stage:
Development of the Opin.fi service
Feedback from the beta stage confirmed that the service is necessary and that development is moving in the right direction. Many of the development ideas that emerged during the beta stage are already on the roadmap for the future of the service.
After the beta stage, the development work has continued on features laid down in the roadmap, but certain things have also been prioritised based on the feedback received. Some aspects that were highlighted in the feedback were the accuracy of the course search feature and the functionality of the filters, and those aspects have now been under special scrutiny.
Before going into production, the service underwent extensive testing rounds. The testing process has been subsequently developed and enhanced for the launch. The beta stage also made it possible to test the service in the actual production environment and with genuine data on courses and credits. Although some errors surfaced, they were fixable and taken into account in further development.
Introducing the service in higher education institutions
The Opin.fi service was introduced in the first eight higher education institutions in spring 2024. Launching the service is an extensive process involving experts from higher education institutions in areas such as technical integrations, the administration of the study offering, required courses and communication. Higher education institutions will start using the service gradually in three groups between 2024 and 2025, and the later groups will benefit from the lessons learned in the beta stage.
Based on the beta stage, the steps and instructions for introducing the service have been specified, allowing higher education institutions to operate more independently. For example, more time has now been reserved for testing study offering integrations, and higher education institutions can access the Opin.fi environment at an earlier stage. Course materials have also been developed based on initial experiences.
Service management and production
In the beta stage, the production environment of the service was taken into use for the first time, which enabled testing the transfer of data from the test environment to production. During the autumn, the process of transferring data into production was improved on the basis of lessons learned.
There were relatively few incident reports during the autumn. Initially, there were some challenges in transferring some learners’ course data, but the problem was fixed based on feedback. This also allowed testing the process of receiving incident reports ad fixing the reported problems.
The beta stage also involved testing the processes of the Digivisio 2030 project and HigherEd Hub Finland Oy, responsible for the operation of the Opin.fi service. All in all, the cooperation went well, but there were also some points of improvement.
Marketing and communication
The beta stage was also the first opportunity to test marketing and communications related to the Opin.fi service together with higher education institutions. The campaign for the beta stage was promoted both on the Opin.fi channels and on the higher education institutions’ channels. The marketing contents worked well throughout the autumn, and the target audience was interested in the service.
Experiences confirmed that broad visibility is important especially in the early stages of the service; as expected, only some of the people who saw the promotional materials navigated to the service, and a small proportion of them registered for courses. As Opin.fi is a new and yet-unknown service, systematic and regular marketing is essential for increasing awareness. These lessons learned will inform the marketing and communication strategy when launching the service with the other higher education institutions.
Product Manager Annu Ruuhisalmi presented some of the lessons learned from the beta stage at a webinar in February. Watch a recording of Annu’s presentation (in Finnish):
About the beta stage:
The beta version of the Opin.fi service was available from 8 October to 19 December 2024. The aim was to collect user experiences and get feedback for the further development and launch of the service. In addition to testing the service with end users, the beta stage involved introducing the service at higher education institutions and promoting the service cooperatively.
In the beta stage, the service featured some 1,200 courses from the first eight higher education institutions: Aalto University, Haaga-Helia, Häme University of Applied Sciences, University of Jyväskylä, Lapland University of Applied Sciences, University of Lapland, Laurea University of Applied Sciences and Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences
Analytics and feedback on the service were monitored during the beta stage – the lessons learned have been reviewed and used in further development.