Opin.fi – the journey towards a new era of learning

How will learning look in the future when 37 higher education institutions join forces and the voice of the learner is at the centre of development? The Opin.fi service is the first step towards a model country of lifelong learning – and for us, the design journey taught us the ideal of co-creation.

When we started designing the Opin.fi service, we had one clear goal: to make the offering of continuous learning at the university level genuinely accessible to all Finns, regardless of time and place. This could not merely be a technical project or a new digital service. It was a question of something much larger – how lifelong learning could be integrated into everyday life in the future, and how learning competes for time with everything else.

Launched in the spring of 2025, Opin.fi is the first visible solution of the Digivisio 2030 programme. The programme involves the collaboration of 37 higher education institutions all over Finland, also making this endeavour unique on a global scale. The shared mission is an ambitious one: to build a model country for flexible and lifelong learning in Finland. The process of creating Opin.fi was also a wonderful learning journey in itself.

Co-creation as a strength

When so many higher education institutions and thousands of experts are involved, it is not always so clear to see how things are progressing. It was therefore important to recognise that the design should be more than just skin-deep – it had to serve as a structure through which everything flows. The starting point of the work was gratifying – after all, one of the promises made by the programme was to keep the value of the learner at the centre of development. For us designers, this gave us a mandate to genuinely serve the needs of the end user, thus creating value.

Co-creation primarily meant listening to the design team. We held discussions with experts from hundreds of higher education institutions, organised dozens of workshops and met learners in a variety of life situations. Their experiences and wishes told us what generates real value, not to mention what does not. In many cases, the most rewarding aspect was when learners talked honestly about their everyday challenges. Based on this feedback, we were able to formulate solutions that are not merely abstract, but concern the learner’s reality.

From triple diamond to implementation

When designing Opin.fi, we employed the triple diamond model, which involves an alternating rotation of strategic design, service design and solution design. This design process ran from brainstorming to implementation, thus enabling the simultaneous promotion of topics in the different stages of maturity. In the stage of strategic design, we drew a picture of the learner’s lifelong path: what kind of value the service should produce and where obstacles to learning form. We quickly identified the biggest sore spots of learners: a fragmented offering, difficulty finding options that are most suitable to them, and lack of a sense of control.

Once we knew what these were, we were able to come up with solutions together. We conceptualised the service areas – offering, guidance, recommendation, data use, registration – and tested them with learners and higher education institutions. Using the triple diamond model as a frame of reference helped discussions simultaneously at different levels – on certain occasions, people delved deep into data analysis, while on others, they stopped to identify and agree on major questions of principle.

At the decision-making table

The promise of the programme, i.e. putting the benefit of the learner at the centre of development, made it possible to not only keep the learner’s voice front and centre, but also to ensure its inclusion in the core of decision making through design. Even though the decisions of Digivisio 2030 are made by the General Assembly and steering group, which are composed of rectors and senior management from higher education institutions, preparations are made at the programme office. Consequently, we ensured that the understanding created through design was also reflected in decisions: learner value was not merely an appealing idea in the strategy, but a concrete criterion for solutions.

The launch is just the beginning

Launched in May 2025, Opin.fi is an important milestone, but not an end point. The service is designed to be flexible and expandable. The next phase of development will continue with recommendations, the utilisation of one’s own data and increasing the offering. A new phase brought about by artificial intelligence also lies ahead: in the future, the service will be able to suggest courses and learning paths to the learner according to their interests and life situation – in three languages. The information search approaches used by learners are changing with artificial intelligence, and the service must change along with changes in behaviour.

The launch also creates a new layer of learning as data on the use of the service begins to accumulate. This provides higher education institutions with a more in-depth understanding of their own offering and the demand for it – the Finnish continuous learning market. Data is not just a technical by-product, but a tool that

helps develop the range of offerings and increase their accessibility. In addition to this, the possibilities offered by this tool have been examined from a design perspective from the very beginning.

What did we learn?

The journey towards new structures, forms of co-creation and innovations in continuous learning has been an educational one. Co-creation with dozens of organisations and hundreds of experts truly works when systematic structures are created for it. Opin.fi is an example of how a large and complicated entity can be created together when the learner’s perspective is at the core of development – and it gradually takes hold in the thinking processes of everyone working.

Learning competes for time with everything else going on in people’s everyday lives. It has been our goal to build a service that adapts to the learner’s life, not the other way around. This has given us an opportunity to look to the future and ask: what happens when learning is made genuinely accessible? What is required of the service to get each and every one of us to be enthusiastic about developing our own competence – throughout our lives?

The purpose of the service is crystallised in its slogan:
Opin.fi – Open for learning

Heini-Maari Kemppainen has served as the Project Manager for continuous learning in the Digivisio 2030 programme, overseeing the Opin.fi service as a whole, conceptualisation, preparation of decision-making, funding and reporting. The project was granted EUR 11 million in funding from the European Union’s NextGenerationEU fund and is one of the key elements of the Sustainable Growth Programme for Finland. Kemppainen served as the Team Lead in the process area of design, overseeing construction of the overall design process and operating methods to promote transparent and inclusive co-design for stakeholders.

Service Designer Panu Puukari of Solita Oy worked on the Opin.fi service for three years, serving as Design Lead for solution design, creating common operating methods, overseeing the common direction of design and turning the nascent new brand into a digital service. Panu has come up with a substantial number of different concepts for the service and promoted their implementation as a high-quality solution for the end user.