Digital Learning Centre of Competence-based Excellence: Oamk Strategic RDI Profiling Themes

Current key RDI focus areas in Oamkstrategy are digital disruption, environmental knowledge and sustainable well-being. At Oamk, digital disruption focuses on applying new digital technologies and promoting business opportunities, environmental knowledge is particularly linked to the development of the circular economy, responsible industrial production and consumption, and the optimisation of energy generation and use. Sustainable well-being covers the attention paid to demographic diversification, promoting digitalisation in healthcare and social services, and reforming business models. Moreover, the themes of digitalisation, entrepreneurship, internationalisation and networking penetrate all our RDI activities. We conduct our RDI activities in close cooperation with various networks to provide industries with better overall service in the field of competence development. The profiling of the OamkDigComp is based on the strategic choices of the Oamk and has clear incentives for it.In OamkDigComp strategic research, development and innovation activities are focused on the Oamk RDI profiling focus area of digital disruption, with following themes:

1) Competence-based approach2) Digital transformation in the world of work and on societal level3) Digital (learning) solutions to remotely access and operate machines and equipment needed in different disciplines4) Digital pedagogy that supports the previous

With different approaches to development in OamkDigComp, we seek to answe the key challenges set to higher education in Finland by Finnish Education Evaluation Centre. In the OamkDigComp, we want to develop digital pedagogy with competence-based approach to promote pragmatic professional expertise at a level that corresponds to the task given to the universities of applied sciences to organise research-based but practice-oriented education and training with the goal of educating students for professional working life.

COVID-19 has shown us that generic learning solutions are not enough to support our students, who should achieve concrete ability to manage and control different kinds of machines and equipment in different disciplines. In order to respond to this challenge emerging from working life, we aim to support higher education transition towards competence-based approach and a versatile use of digital learning environments especially focusing on remote access and use of machines and equipment in training. This way we can secure availability of competent workforce in different disciplines. As we are able to develop technology that enables the student to acquire competences needed to use machinery and equipment from distance, and digital pedagogy that supports their learning, we are a step closer in answering the recognised needs of the rapidly changing labour market. With competence-based approach we can focus on individual upskilling to meet the unique professional needs.