The aim of this article was to analyse the experiences of the project management course taught jointly by the teachers from Turku University of Applied Sciences (TUAS) and Satakunta University of Applied Sciences (SAMK) to their Master-level students with the help of virtual learning tools.
The feedback survey results revealed that there are no significant differences between the students’ feedback in the joint 2015 course compared to TUAS only course in 2015. It seems that a jointly arranged course is as satisfactory as the school-specific implementation. However, the students enjoyed the group work used in one session during the course, and they also would like to have more practical group work. This seems to be a key improvement point for the course implementation. Additionally, if considering the efficiency from both SAMK’s and TUAS’ point of view, the joint set-up is valuable as it saves teachers’ overall efforts and, at the same time, makes it possible for the students to have an opportunity to take part in the course even though there are not enough students in a single organisation to arrange a course of its own.
Teaching in this kind of joint course has its challenges. If there is not enough time to learn to use the tools this may introduce difficulties also to teachers. In this course both teachers faced this challenge: the SAMK teacher had challenges with
ViLLE and the TUAS teacher had problems when dealing with the HILL environ-ment. More time should have been used to learn how to use the systems. Note that the students in the 2014 course provided slightly better feedback about the usage of ViLLE, probable due to better on-site guidance about the usage that was easy to arrange, because the students were in the same location as the teacher.
In collaborative online teaching it is important that the joint courses are planned and developed using the same tools that are used for the actual course implementa-tions. It is also important to have frequent collaboration between teachers during the implementation. This provides the teachers a possibility to adapt the new learn-ing sessions based on their experiences and also based on the feedback.
It is also important that the VLE is easy to use and that there are active people and resources available in order to develop the VLE continuously. It can be expected that in the future more and more teachers will be involved in online teaching, not only those teachers who have advanced skills and capabilities to adapt the newest technology. That is why special attention should be paid to taking into account user experiences and feedback both from the students and the teachers in the develop-ment of the VLE. Maybe the biggest challenge in virtual learning in the future is to link the student’s own PLE successfully with official pedagogical learning environ-ments. Social media communities and tools may help in this process.
The learning method innovations with a wider amount of group work outside in-class sessions used in the Media Culture 2020 project (Vickers, Field & Melakoski 2015) should be tested when arranging collaborative teaching between universities (like SAMK and TUAS) and between different sites within universities (like Salo and Turku at TUAS). This enriches the students’ learning experiences with the pos-sibilities offered by the new technologies. It is also recommended that this kind of joint courses will be implemented at both SAMK and TUAS also in the future, not only for the Master-level courses but also for the Bachelor degree, especially using the latest technologies such as cloud services. This allows for more innovative and collaborative ways for learning, and also increases our possibilities to share and ex-pand our expertise.
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