Markku Markkula: "Europeans have learned to network, and the working culture is increasingly changing towards working and learning together"

You have been a member of the Finnish Parliament, where you worked closely with traineducation and e-learning issues. In your experience, what do you consider to be the most crucial advance in European e-learning?

The desired future cannot be invented in the traditional way. We need more innovativeness and more innovations. We, Europeans, have learned to network, and our working culture is increasingly changing towards working and learning together. In this very much needed cultural development, progress in technology is a crucial precondition. In working communities in general, and in education in particular, ICT enables totally new dimensions and new levels of quality in creating joint innovative solutions to meet the challenges we are facing. The changes needed in work culture at all levels of modern knowledge societies are still huge. Both the decision makers and e-learning practitioners need to be more open minded and committed to hard work in order to generate technological and social innovations.

Finland is one of the top countries in education and information society development. What could be done to enable other countries to benefit from Finland’s experience and example?


Too often the wheel is reinvented through countless projects. On the one hand, this is positive, as people learn. But if the decision-makers want to reach the targets of the Lisbon strategy, they have to invest much more in really large and in-depth multidisciplinary development projects. We have plenty of good experiences regarding systemic development processes. Conceptualising the results and disseminating them through effective learning and implementation processes should be emphasised, by using substantially more money on this than has so far been used.

What are the main activities of the Lifelong Learning Institute Dipoli in the area of e-learning?


TKK Dipoli has indeed been and perhaps still is a forerunner in lifelong learning and professional development. Our uniqueness still lies in linking quite successfully the latest industrial and scientific developments in the areas of foresight, innovation and productivity with the latest e-learning developments. Our special expertise is in organising knowledge creation processes with concepts, models or roadmaps, if you like, as the outcomes. We have participated in a number of quite successful European projects working on these kinds of tools for knowledge creation and learning; for example, in the Value-Scout project a powerful tool was developed to foresee emerging learning needs through a specific model designed to detect needs by analysing both strong and weak signals through a specific methodology.

In your organisation, what do you consider to be the impact of e-learning on students' networking and lifelong learning?

The learning habits of youngsters, who have used computer games and networks since their early childhood, are very different compared to those who have not had much experience in using ICT. The huge impact will be seen when the development of using ICT, which we see in the entertainment industry, is implemented in education with the same enthusiasm. This is really creating new value networks globally, which is also big business. Education is expensive, and this radical change to use ICT effectively is even more expensive. But it is most expensive to continue with the traditional teacher and lecture-centric educational model. The new mode is characterised by phrases describing learning throughout your life: “learning is fun”, “learning is based on curiosity and inquiry”, “learning is knowledge creation through collaboration and communication”, “learning means happiness”, and “learning means challenging job opportunities based on your own interest”.