Digimentors Provide Low-Threshold Support for Educational Development

At the University of Oulu, education, digitalization, the attractiveness of studies, and high-quality, flexible teaching play a very strong role in the university's strategy. Each faculty, as well as the Language and Communication Centre (Lingua), has their own digimentor. Digimentors genuinely support teachers towards university's strategic goals, which are also important themes nationally and globally. They assist teachers by encouraging, planning, providing hands-on help, offering guidance, giving feedback, and sharing knowledge.

“I hope teachers will contact me even with very low thresholds. They can reach out to me if, for example, using Moodle or organizing practical aspects of hybrid teaching is causing headaches. I am also happy to help with the digital pedagogical planning of large courses, as an example. Courses do not need to be fully online to ask for help,” says Anu Tuomela, digimentor of the Faculty of Science.

Digital mentors are experts in pedagogy. They help in the pedagogical planning of teaching. How to design a remote course where students truly interact with the teacher and other students? How to organize a large course so that the teaching is high-quality and does not cause an enormous workload for the teacher?

“An hour spent planning and building with a mentor can, at best, reduce the endless stream of emails related to course instructions to a small trickle, help a larger number of students pass the course on schedule, and provide the teacher with analytical tools to find the points where students struggle. This saves everyone’s time during the course, after it, and when developing

it further - working together with a digimentor,” says Joakim Tervonen, digimentor of Oulu Business School

The digimentor works together with the teacher. Examples of utilizing digimentoring as teacher:

  • Guidance in hybrid teaching from practical arrangements to planning
  • Planning face-to-face/hybrid/remote courses in digipedagogically high-quality way
  • Choosing, building, and guiding the use of a suitable platform/digital tool for learning, e.g. Moodle, Howspace, ThingLink
  • Guiding with video learning materials and helping to use learning analytics from videos
  • Guidance on topics such as AI, accessibility, Opin.fi service, UNIC
  • Developing a MOOC course

In addition to helping teachers, digital mentors also work with key teaching personnel in the faculty, coordinating the annually updated digitalization program for the faculty. The digitalization program serves as a tool for teaching planning, aiming for high-quality and flexible teaching supported by digital tools.

“Digitalization is not an end in itself, but it is definitely an opportunity,” tells Anu.

Digital mentors also work in their network on community-wide tasks within the university, highlighting the faculty’s perspective. For example, the university’s general AI guidelines for theses have been the latest task on the digital mentor team’s list. The digital mentor team can also bring together people from different educational fields working on the same theme for multidisciplinary collaboration to develop education. The options for utilizing digital mentoring are very diverse.

"I have received inquiries about both small everyday challenges and more creative new ideas. The variety in our work is what makes it both rewarding and exciting," says Anu.