EUR 4 million in additional funding for the Continuous Learning Project

The total funding for the Digivisio 2030 Continuous Learning Project grew to EUR 10 million. The special grant of the Ministry of Education and Culture was received by Metropolia University of Applied Sciences Ltd on behalf of the Digivisio 2030 consortium. The purpose to get the service ready to use and lay a foundation for the national implementation of micro-credentials.

The total funding for the Digivisio 2030 Continuous Learning Project grew to EUR 10 million. The special grant of the Ministry of Education and Culture was received by Metropolia University of Applied Sciences Ltd on behalf of the Digivisio 2030 consortium.

As a priority project for the first stage of the Digivisio 2030 project, the Continuous Learning Project involves creating the Opin.fi service. Another programme objective is to carry out pilots on the production of digitally supported courses with higher education institutions. The Continuous Learning Project was launched at the beginning of 2022 and will conclude at the end of 2024.

The purpose of the additional funding is to promote the completion and commissioning of the Opin.fi service package in higher education institutions.

“We are in an interesting stage of development because the beta version of the Opin.fi service will be taken into use in the first higher education institutions at the end of 2024. As a result, the first users will also have limited access to the service. The actual launch and start of use at higher education institutions is scheduled for 2025”, explains Project Manager Heini-Maari Kemppainen.

Another aim of the additional funding is to produce the first pilots on the national implementation of micro-credentials.

“In 2024, there will be a concept drawn up to describe how the micro-credentials produced by higher education institutions could be presented in connection with the Opin.fi service and to what extent the national framework for micro-credentials promoted by the Ministry of Education and Culture, which is still under way, could be implemented within the service framework”, Kemppainen summarises.

The Continuous Learning Project is included in Finland’s Sustainable Growth Programme, which is a national recovery and resilience plan drawn up as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. Measures recorded in the programme receive funding from the European Commission’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), including this additional funding. A total of EUR 6 million has previously been granted to the Continuous Learning Project. With this recent addition, the project has received a total of EUR 10 million in funding. The funding will expire on 31 December 2024.

The Continuous Learning Project aims to combine the offerings of higher education institutions in a way that has not been done before and to enable more flexible learning, independent of time and place, for learning new skills and updating existing ones. The project examines matters related to the production of a digitally supported course offering with high quality in terms of content and pedagogical value. Pilots are carried out to experiment how to make higher education institutions’ use of resources more efficient in relation to teaching and its provision.

Opin.fi is a completely new digital service that brings together the open study offerings of Finnish higher education institutions in one place. The solution is created for everyone who wants to apply or return to higher education.

In the future, each learner will continuously develop themselves, learning new things and updating their old skills. Opin.fi encourages students to familiarise themselves with the most diverse study opportunities and helps them plan their own individual learning journey.