Curriculum Design workshop in Tallinn

Collaborative Curriculum Design workshop was held 25.11.2024 in Tallinn together with all project partners in the premises of Estonian Refugee Council. The aim for this workshop was to co-create a curriculum for upcoming entrepreneurship trainings to be held in Finland and Estonia during next year. Our project team has been working actively already several months in the analysis phases of the project to create an understanding of existing entrepreneurship trainings and AI trainings in both countries and also to get understanding of our target group and their needs for the trainings.

Senior Lecturer Johanna Mäkeläinen from Haaga-Helia worked as fasilitator in the workshop giving us an insightful background information what we have already gathered during the first months including the following topics: overview of existing training AI tools review (Gen AI tools, AI enabled tools, RAGs and other custom AI tools) and customer understanding. Senior Researcher Umair Ali Khan from Haaga-Helia demonstrated how digital tools, already created in the project are working emphasizing also the difference between learning assistant, smart guides and business assistant.

After a short break we continued to the co-creation activities. We worked in pairs with digital platform Miro focusing on the learning journey of our target group in our future training program (before, during and after training) by utilizing empathy mapping. It is a method, which helps us to build empathy with our end users. Each pair discussed about possible pains and gains of our target group personas (which we have created together based on our previous experience and findings of the typical representatives of our target group members).

Finally, we discussed about curriculum design, based on prework made by Johanna. The main discussions and questions were about the following topics; Which modules are the most crucial to include in the course? What could maybe be left out? How much time we would need in trainings? How much participants could select from different topics – what is mandatory, what is optional? How much work the whole course would involve from the trainers and participants? Should some trainings need to be organized face-to-face? What could be the cross-border element in the trainings? With intensive discussions time flied quickly and many details of learning course will be discussed in the future meetings. When heading back to Helsinki with Eckerö Line we all agreed how important it is for the project consortium to arrange co-creation activities also face-to-face, at least once in a while.

Text by: project manager Nora Lappalainen, Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences