June

Pedaforum 2026

Kuopio is known for its beautiful boating routes and the Puijo Tower, but also for its well-organized conferences. We had the opportunity to enjoy a well-organized conference event on June 2–3, when participants from several universities involved in the YJOP project attended the Pedaforum conference organized by Savonia University of Applied Sciences and the University of Eastern Finland. The event provided an opportunity to hear about the latest experiments and research in higher education teaching, as well as to present the project’s own poster.
The conference was quite large, bringing together a large group of professionals interested in higher education pedagogy in the beautiful facilities of the Lumit arts high school, which served the conference needs excellently.

From the perspective of the YJOP project, one of the key highlights was the keynote delivered by Jonna Korhonen from the Ministry of Education and Culture. In her presentation, she outlined the possible impacts of the new Vision for Higher Education and Research 2040 on future higher education policy. From the viewpoint of micro-credentials, the keynote included several interesting insights. Currently, challenges have been identified related to the funding model, which limits incentives for providing continuous learning. Therefore, it was encouraging to see that the action recommendations directed at higher education institutions included proposals for reforming the funding and steering of continuous learning. This is critically important from the perspective of developing micro-credentials, and our own project’s data collection—especially interviews conducted with strategic-level actors—supports this message.

Otherwise, the program offered an impressively broad range of presentations on pedagogical development projects and experiments, as well as related research. One of the most interesting sessions I attended focused on exploring different solutions for organizing education for students whose native language is neither Finnish nor Swedish. The number of international students and those whose first language is not a national language is increasing, which challenges education providers. In the future, the flexibility and customizability of micro-credentials could play a key role in organizing such education. For example, targeted training could be offered to individuals who have already completed degrees in their home countries but need to supplement their skills through micro-credentials in order to strengthen their position in the labor market.

Another interesting highlight from the perspective of continuous learning was a workshop that examined university courses related to artificial intelligence and their content. From my perspective, such broad, cross-cutting themes relevant to working life could provide a good starting point for designing stackable micro-credentials.

For the project itself, the most important outcome was, of course, the feedback and comments received on our poster. The poster session highlighted the project’s current key aspects while also looking ahead to the coming autumn.

The data collection carried out last autumn provided several discussion topics for conference participants to reflect on. In particular, I asked education professionals to comment on our plans for an online course launching in the autumn. Those who visited the poster quite understandably emphasized the need for a clear description starting from the basics—what a micro-credential actually is. While presenting, I noticed that it is necessary to begin with very fundamental information about micro-credentials, which is a valuable insight for further development.
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Another key observation concerned the practical orientation of the online course. The feedback highlighted that, amid a busy everyday life, participants need to quickly get into the practical aspects of creating and designing micro-credentials, so that they can immediately feel the usefulness of the course. With these development areas in mind, it is a good point to continue the work again in August.
Registration for the webinar introducing the online course in the autumn is already open. Before that, however, it is time for a short break and a warm summer.