Podcast 
What are the megatrends currently affecting learning and education? What does the future of learning look like right now? In the first episode of the podcast, we discuss the future of learning with President Ilkka Niemelä from Aalto University and Expert Sanna Rekola from Sitra. The host of the podcast is Programme Director Hanna Nordlund. The language of the podcast is Finnish.
Listen to the episode here:
Transcription of the episode
(Music)
Hanna Norlund:
Welcome to the podcast of the Digivisio 2030 programme, where we talk about what kind of future or learning we are building in Finland right now. I am Hanna Norlund, and there are different specialist quests sharing the microphone with me. This is where Oppimisen Seuraava Luku [Next Chapter of Learning] starts.
(Music)
Hanna Norlund:
This is where our new podcast starts, where we talk about themes of future learning from different perspectives with interesting specialists. In this first episode, my guests are the principal of Aalto University and the chairperson of the steering group of Digivisio 2030 programme, Ilkka Niemelä, and Sitra’s specialist of foresight, Sanna Rekola. Today we are discussing about what kind of megatrends affect education and learning in the future and what the future looks like right now. It’s wonderful to have you as a guest here, Ilkka. You are working as the principal of Aalto University as well as the chairperson of the steering group of Digivisio programme. If you could first summarise, what Digivisio programme is about.
Ilkka Niemelä:
Yes. It is a unique project in Finland. The whole field of universities came together to create a flexible, university-border crossing and learner-oriented future learning ecosystem for future needs.
Hanna Norlund:
The other specialist guest is Sanna. You work for Sitra, and you have been a part of drafting the Megatrends report that was published at the beginning of the year. What matter related to learning has been especially topical for you or close to your heart lately?
Sanna Rekola:
While making the Megatrends report and previously while I was part of Sitra’s Sivistys+ project, I have been thinking what kind of goals and targets we overall set for learning and who sets them and what is actually the narrative that guides education and civilisation in our time more broadly and what it maybe should be. This is something that I have been thinking a lot lately.
Hanna Norlund:
Sounds very interesting. Our topic of the day is the future of learning. What are your initial thoughts when you think about this pairing of words? Ilkka can start.
Ilkka Niemelä:
Yes. I feel like the fact that learning has a future and maybe even so that if we think about human life, it’s something that will become even more important for us. Learning isn’t restricted to childhood, but it’s actually something that is with us our whole life. The world is changing in such a pace. When we listen to Sanna a bit more, we will probably get to these things. I feel like this is what comes to my mind. In the future, learning will be very important and learning will carry on through our entire life cycle.
Hanna Norlund:
What about Sanna?
Sanna Rekola:
I will continue with what I left off with which is what for do we actually learn things. I see that right now, we are on the edge of a paradigm shift concerning the future of learning. This has been discussed a lot on international fora. For example, Unesco has led a Future of Education process, where they think about what learning actually is today. It has also been discussed about in Finland. I think that the working group of sustainable development that drafted the Agenda 2030 roadmap last year is talking about very important matters. They stated that education and know-how and sustainable lifestyle are one of the most important areas of change when we are going towards the future. We need learning to build a sustainable future, and we need to take into account our societal problems and challenges much more forcefully in the core of learning.
Hanna Norlund:
Learning is changing, and like Ilkka said, it is with us our whole lives. There are multiple megatrends that affect the direction that learning is going. Sanna, tell me a bit which megatrends you think will especially affect learning in the future?
Sanna Rekola:
Yes. Megatrends are big future progressions. In January 2023, Sitra published an updated report on what today’s big progressions or megatrends look like. We identified five big changes that cannot be ignored today, which are that the carrying capacity of the nature is crumbling, the challenges in welfare are growing, the struggle of democracy increases, the competition over digital power accelerates and the foundation of economy is cracking. These are all very big courses of change, which will definitely all affect learning in one way or another or actually in many different ways, you could say. But what I think is that these megatrends are also connected to each other, and they should be looked at as a whole and think about their effects on each other. All of these changes affect learning, but these should also be thought of as a whole and think about what kind of competence needs for example we will have when we think about the crumbling of the capacity of nature which is at the centre of everything. That is the most important and significant megatrend for me, and we in Sitra have wanted to set it at the centre of megatrends, because it’s the change that will define our future most significantly. How we respond to that will affect which direction we are going in practice. The ecological sustainability crisis is already here, and we have to look for solutions for it immediately, and this challenges us as societies to be renewed comprehensively, and those effects can be seen in all fields in competence needs and in where the learning should be targeted at. This is what I think.
Hanna Norlund:
If you think about your own work, Ilkka, what megatrends do you see already very strongly affecting learning and education?
Ilkka Niemelä:
There are many levels. One is of course the content, so questions about learning objectives and things like these. Also questions of sustainable development that include the economical sustainability and the question of biodiversity are things that will be included in contents and leaning modules. Another big question is the fast technological development in the background and questions regarding those breakthroughs that change learning. We have to think about the things that we want to master and learn and at which point. And here learning to learn is actually one big central thing because we see that the world is changing at such a pace that learning factual information isn’t actually the primary thing. That has to be done all the time. Then there is of course the digital breakthrough which already strongly affects learning and how we work and organise. There was a huge leap during the pandemic in this. These megatrends actually already affect what work looks like in the future. At universities, we always have to look at the working life, not what is happening right now, but what it could look like in 50 years when the students are graduating. It looks like working life is now in a big transitional phase. The concept of work is changing, and we have to be ready for that. That’s also visible. But then the significance of know-how in today’s society is actually only growing. It is complex because the questions we deal with are challenging and we need new skilled labour. The lack of skilled labour and the competition over skilled labour is on a much harder level than it was for example ten or twenty years ago. It also has a strong effect on what the operational environment looks like where the students and researchers and teachers are. At least these kinds of trends are visible directly in the work that is done at the universities.
Hanna Norlund:
In both of your speeches you highlighted future orientation, sustainability and the fact that we have to learn continuously. Ilkka, you have been a part of Digivision 2030 programme since its foundation. How would you describe the way that universities together through this programme create the future of learning?
Ilkka Niemelä:
These were many interesting levels. One is that this kind of a programme wants the grounds to come together, to build a joint picture of the situation, to learn from one another as well as to create a joint vision of the future that we could use to respond to the big challenges. That’s probably one big thing that this kind of programme has brought to the university. We have had a lot of discussions between us and in different kinds of networks and groups, but now that the whole field of universities are involved, it is quite a resource. This programme also enables creating together. We can use quite a lot of expertise of the universities to do joint development. Instead of everyone working in their own university on their own area, we can bring our best experts to do joint work. Then the third level is concrete so what we achieve and what it looks like and how we involve the learners. The development work gets faster when we start implementing those ideas and learn on the way. We do this work with agile methods that are very user-oriented and learner-oriented. They create a possibility to go much deeper and further than any individual university could on their own. These are the mechanisms that the programme uses to enable us to manage the current teaching and research work, but also to build a very future-oriented operating model where we can use the best abilities and ideas. It also helps everyone in the work towards change.
Hanna Norlund:
What do you think, Sanna, are cooperation, creating a joint picture of the situation, learning from each other and understanding users strong ways of understanding megatrends and in preparing for future?
Sanna Rekola:
They are very essential. The cooperation that the universities are doing with this programme sounds great and it sounds like an operating model that we need more broadly in society. I think that megatrends and the challenges related to them are so big and no actor, no country, no organisation can respond to them, we need wide and cross-border cooperation. We also need to look for cooperation partners in places where we haven’t even thought to look for them before and look for a more comprehensive perspective and view in relation to the challenges and also the solutions. Because these megatrends are intertwined, it’s very important that we think of them as a whole. Our requisites to respond for example to the crumbling of nature’s carrying capacity depend very much on how we succeed in renewing our economic system or what direction digitalisation and data economy develop. All of these megatrends are connected to each other, and that requires new type of creativity from us to solve these challenges. We don’t have the answers ready. We also have to expose ourselves to the joint uncertainty where we start looking for answers. We are dealing with very complex issues, and we need to build cooperation and cooperation skills for the systemic change that we need.
Hanna Norlund:
We know that age groups in Finland are getting smaller and the lack of skilled labour is also targeted at higher level skilled labour. For example, the technology industry’s estimate is that by 2030, we will need 130,000 new skilled workers and about 60 percent of them should also have a university degree. So we have a real need to raise the whole nation’s know-how and education level. What do you think Sanna, how critical is this phase we are living in right now related to this?
Sanna Rekola:
It is critical in the sense that we have acute challenges in our society that we need to be able to solve and also we need the know-how to solve these challenges. So in that sense investing into continuous learning and learning overall is, one could say, even vital and an investment into the future that we should make if we want to give our posterity, the next generations a habitable planet. Of course the urgency is highlighted when we think about the ecological sustainability crisis that does not wait for the economic situations to change. We have to urgently tackle those problems that we are already familiar with in a sense, but we don’t always remember to prioritise them. Because the slower we respond to them, the more likely it is that we will encounter them later in a crisis mode and we will be in an even bigger problem with them. From the perspective of know-how, I think that it is very important to be future-oriented, as has been said here before, and in addition that we always keep the needs of the present in our minds while developing the available courses and that we also actively think about the future on the long term and also utilise it from the perspective of the future. For example by examining things through megatrends, we can observe many things that we know will be present in our lives in the future and what kind of know-how we need for that. On the other hand, we also know that we live in a post-normal time where there are surprises and crises and it is impossible to prepare for everything, but through forecasting we can see them or anticipate them. Often their backgrounds have long-span and long-term courses of change, megatrends. In that way, the megatrends can help us encounter also these surprises and crises. So somehow we should get the learning to throb in the same beat or together with the changing of the world, and we should also be sensitive to the signals from the future of what we should learn.
(Music)
Hanna Norlund:
Continuous learning has been a strong topic of societal discussion lately, and the Digivisio programme has also decided that the cooperation of universities will be brought forward with a focus on continuous learning. The aim is to get the offering of continuous learning more accessible for different learners. The Ministry of Education and Culture published a national strategy of the continuous learning of universities last autumn, and they set as a national target that at least 50 percent of young adults would complete a university degree and 60 percent of adults would participate in annual continuous learning. Ilkka, what do you think as a university principal that what does continuous learning in a university environment mean and how could universities create better conditions for continuous learning so that it responds to the needs that Sanna has brought up?
Ilkka Niemelä:
It is actually quite a big and fundamental change how higher education has been talked about and thought about. There is a lot of what Sanna said, that before we thought that a person gets a university degree and higher education when they are young and that will carry you through life. Now on the other hand, careers are a lot longer, but fast changes occur on the side. There is disruption. We have big challenges, and the requirements of working life and the expectations of society are changing. When we have talked about continuous learning before, we thought that it’s about raising the level of education. We target the resources to those who have a bad educational level or want to improve it. But now we have understood that universities also need updating of education or downright renewal in this fast change. That affects the individuals employment and effects and motivation, but in terms of society. Sanna said very nicely that if we want to and we have to be able to change, working life, companies and the society needs to change, those changes have to be made through people. Often that change requires new know-how. If it only comes through young people to working life is much too slow of a path in today’s world and in this change and in this actual crisis that we are living in right now. That is why it’s very important that also universities think about how the renewal of know-how can be brought faster to the use of companies in the society so that those big changes can actually be implemented. Of course young people are very important, but we need the whole workforce there. This requires completely new type of thinking. We have so much good content. We bring the newest research and newest methods in the degree programmes. If we think about it through people in working life, the contents are good, but we have to think about how to package them and in what form they are offered in. We have a good open university and we get many things through that, but often when we talk about higher educated people, we have to think that it is actually expert education that is not general education or widely scalable. We have to think about completely new operational models where we have to be able to target the education and to find the right audience, and then the offering has to be something that fits the model of working life. This is a completely different question than our degree programmes. In the end, we actually have a very homogeneous body of students. We know what the know-how is after high school. That is what we start with. When we think about working life, everyone is an individual with their own background, work history, and we need to find flexible and quite adaptive models to find the right education for the right need. These are the things that we are trying to find solutions for together in Digivisio. Then there is the interesting question of how the society will participate in this. These are all things that require resources. It would be a very difficult situation if those resources were taken away from young people’s degree programmes because there we are putting two things against each other where both of them suffer. We cannot afford to compromise on the degree programmes of young people because that is the basis of life that actually carries or decides on the direction of bringing their own life management, but it is also societally important for participation that you have a possibility to educate yourself. That is why we have to think about the resource models for continuous learning in a new way. In quite many countries, they use methods where they can combine funding mechanisms in a way that there is the learner’s contribution, maybe the employer’s contribution and often also the contribution of the government, because the fact that the level of education rises has extremely strong multiplier effects. It makes this change faster. It is an important thing for the planet but also for companies in the sense that education is done where it is economically smart to do and where there are good incentives. That also helps the companies to renew but also to make them stronger. It brings new jobs and investments. It has a lot of multiplier effect. I think that we are in a situation where we have understood the need for continuous learning and the urgency, but then the solutions that we are thinking of currently are still a bit primitive. This is from the perspective of a university principal. For example in Aalto, we renewed our strategy a couple of years ago and saw that continuous learning will actually be a very big and important task for the university. Higher educated people need education that includes the newest research-based information, and we have started to develop that. But then the open question still is that how can we get this in such a scale and pace that we can answer the planet’s big challenges.
Hanna Norlund:
Sanna is nodding along in the studio. Do you want to reflect on what Ilkka said? How does this sound to you?
Sanna Rekola:
It sounds like a necessary and essential direction. Higher educated people also need continuous learning, and also that it serves the more individual needs when people are already in the working life. They already have a professional identity and probably a quite highly developed expertise in a certain matter, and then on the other hand they might have a need to direct it in a new direction. From the perspective of effectiveness, it is good that there is the connection to working life and in operating directly in the society. It is wonderful if we can develop and offer those kind of possibilities so that we can develop know-how in an agile way.
Hanna Norlund:
There is also a very high globally accelerating competition of skilled workers. We know that a lot of different know-how is needed in the labour market now and in the future. Like you have brought up, the know-how is also often changing very fast. According to the expert group of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Finland will need about a hundred thousand new skilled international workers by 2030. Sanna, how do you see that Finland’s competitiveness and continuous learning are connected to each other?
Sanna Rekola:
This is quite a difficult question. I would analyse it in the way that it is very important for the future of Finland that we succeed in the green transition and that we would have a habitable planet. The ecological reconstruction that we should urgently deal with will take us to that direction. I also think that Finland is a country that has high potential or a strong potential to become a forerunner in relation to a lot of the challenges at hand. This can also attract skilled workers from other places, so that we genuinely don’t bring added value just for Finland and the competitiveness of Finland but also more broadly globally, and then through the skilled workers who come here from other countries, we can also scale it more broadly. In a sense everybody benefits. Maybe here the continuous learning is also connected to the fact that when we are dealing with big societal questions that we don’t have answers to, of course it requires us to expose ourselves to continuous learning. We learn together, and if we think that we are bringing together skilled labour of high level, I am sure that many kinds of learning happens when we bring people together. I think here cooperation is also in a significant role, and continuous learning as well in the way that we are looking for solutions to these challenges together.
Ilkka Niemelä:
I could continue with that and agree with what Sanna said. If we think about competitiveness, I think that Finland has quite big chances to be a global forerunner in the green transition and to produce solutions that have a big sustainable handprint in the world. This requires investments. This requires us to invest in that area. We have a good framework for that and the regulation environment allows us to dare to invest. I think we are constantly going to that direction. For example the new RDI law that came into force obligates the future government to also make a long-term plan. But what we often forget is that the investments and money don’t really help. Because now we are thinking of what to do with that money and in practice, that goes to expert work. Over a half of the RDI investments is actually going to human work, to RDI expert work. That also brings the connection to competitiveness. If we actually want to create change with that money and investment, it requires know-how and skilled workers, people. The amount of international skilled workers is one central question, but it also goes back to how we renew the know-how of people in working life at that moment in a way that they can participate in the important work concerning investments and in making the green transition. I think that in the end the most central question in competitiveness is that where are those skilled workers coming from, and they are coming from many places. We have to raise the level of education of young people, to offer possibilities for higher education there. We have to get international skilled workers, but we also have to make sure that the level of know-how of people already in working life can be raised and renewed.
Hanna Norlund:
Then one perspective for global competitiveness is also that universities are a part of the global educational market and a part of that competition field through that. Ilkka, what does the global situation of the educational market look like from your perspective at the moment?
Ilkka Niemelä:
In a sense, we are in an interesting situation. In practice, there is a lack of skilled workers all over the world. We are in no way in a special situation here in Finland. Actually in developed countries and also in China, the population has declined. Age groups get smaller. That means there are less young people on the labour market, and on the other hand, bigger age groups retire and leave the working life. This is the challenging situation. Actually only Africa has a lot of young people. That is why also higher education has big competition. We should constantly be thinking that if we make some decisions in Finland, we do not have a nice luxury domestic market, but the modern youth looks at their possibilities in quite a broad way and chooses interesting destinations. We have to be able to be attractive in that. That is why programmes like Digivisio are good because then we can create competitiveness with good cooperation and network-like activity. Another big thing is that we need more higher education and of course the costs are significant, which means that the educational field will digitalise in a significant way. We haven’t talked a lot about artificial intelligence ant the possibilities it brings yet. Of course it’s also a threat, but these questions are such that the field of universities has to take quite a hard look at what they do. How are interesting learning environments created. In the future in quite many fields, the situation is that it will be a hybrid environment where the physical and digital learning environment and methods are combines. The third big question is what learning is, what education is. There is a big trend going on where people develop their own know-how more with a portfolio model rather than degrees. They look for smaller entities and complete their know-how in that way. It also relates to the change in working life and the fast development. The new degree, a master’s degree or something like that, has a specific timespan that it takes to complete it, and the on the other hand, how can it accurately respond to the need that the new project or something else has. So the small know-how entities are a big trend, and this in a way also challenges the role of universities. We have worked with a degree-oriented strategy, and now the world has changed in a way that the learner has a portfolio of things that they have complied from many different sources. And then how the universities take a role in this kind of a world. There are many questions like this one. Maybe the underlying big trend is that how higher education or education overall is localised in a certain place. What is the bigger significance of campuses and learning environments. How do they create competitiveness or are they necessary at all in the future. I think that the current changes that we have seen during the pandemic, for example, are that actually quite many things can be digitalised and put online and scale. In some way those are quite important things to note, but then it might ignore central questions that relate to the development of young people and the social side of learning, that is also very strong.
Sanna Rekola:
Yes. I think localisation is a very interesting perspective in this analysis, and I want to continue with that. I also think that it is very important to think about a person comprehensively and then for the university students or the people returning there to learn in different ways, the significance of interaction is so big, especially when we think about the things that we should learn, somehow the interaction is highlighted. I don’t know if we can take all that in the digital world. Then if we think about how we can get skilled workers to Finland, in that sense it is good if we can build attractive learning environments where people can come and maybe also get to know our society and stay here. I see that from the perspective of Finland, as an attraction factor, we should highlight more the stability of our society, our trustful society, clean nature and possibilities and other things that we can offer here. It is also something where we distinguish ourselves from other countries. We have a society of quite low hierarchy that enables many kinds of activities. I think we should keep our society as a whole in mind as this kind of an environment as well.
Ilkka Niemelä:
That was a good point. It is actually visible in feedback and traction that we look at global competition and think about where students apply to. Experiences of learning together and concrete interactions are very important in that. Then the Nordic societal model and activities based on trust are a very big attraction. The attraction also grew during the corona time. People all over the world saw that there are areas and countries that can act very coherently and inclusively during a crisis situation and create a safe operational environment where we can act cleverly in difficult situations as well as when things are good. The world sees Nordics as a place where we can do a lot of things very resource-efficiently, and in the background, there is of course a rule-based little-corrupted society, where we can take things forward with our own merits and that is very inclusive. If we think about competitiveness from this perspective, our situation isn’t bad at all. But this is only one side. Then we also have to invest in education otherwise. We cannot create competitiveness with only the good properties of our society.
Hanna Norlund:
We have discussed quite big matters in the first episode, and talked about how we have a good and stable basis where to leap from, but then on the other hand, you brought up that learning is the prerequisite of a sustainable future. We have to get different kind of learners, all young people and people in working life to participate in continuous learning, and that is the prerequisite that we can respond to the changes that we are encountering faster and faster. Sanna, I thought it was very interesting when you talked about these megatrends bringing questions in front of us that do not have answers and they are complex things that we have to think of solutions together. I think it was brought up in multiple points of this discussion that the cooperation and that we try to understand complex things together and find ways together to go forward, which is what Digivisio is aiming to do, is our way of reacting and tackling the challenges and to find solutions for them. It was also brought up that we are facing quite big challenges of change, but on the other hand, we also have visions and good prerequisites to solve these big challenges. This has been a very interesting and inspiring discussion, and we probably could have talked a lot more. At this point, Ilkka and Sanna, thank you so much for participating. It was very interesting to think about the future of learning with you. What kind of thoughts did this discussion evoke in our listeners? You can tell us about them and continue the conversation with us about the future of learning on social media with the hashtag Digivisio2030. I am Hanna Norlund, and this was Oppimisen Seuraava Luku.