School’s not out

According to one of the best known songs of Pink Floyd from 1979, ”We don’t need no education. We don't need no thought control.” Already seven years earlier Alice Cooper had claimed on his behalf that ”School's out for summer. School's out forever.”

Both were certainly wrong, we do need more education and the school is nothing but out, even after having earned your first degree or diploma.

There have been many developments recently what comes to education, in which Martti Ahtisaari Institute has been involved – and I do not mean only the distance learning opportunities and offerings caused by the pandemic situation.

Responsible business and entrepreneurship have for quite some time belonged to the institute’s educational contents. Regarding them both, the ongoing fPlaza program given out together with the Oulu University of Applied Sciences and addressing female leaders and entrepreneurs, has been a success already. In addition, the first ”Boostia yrittäjyyteen” – make a boost for entrepreneurship, course for upper secondary school students was given this Spring.

We will also renew the ”Entrepreneurship in Action” course of the university level entrepreneurship minor package, to a new ”Excercising entrepreneurship” module, by the second study period of this year.

Perhaps the most busy times have, however, been what comes to all new education openings. One of them involves block chains that are expected to be as ground breaking as Internet and Web. A large consortium led by the University of Oulu will develop a block chain educational offering including technical, business, legal, infrastructure and application topics.

The ongoing project launched by Oulu Innovation Alliance on improving sales competences has led to the definition of sales education offerings, to be piloted in several different institutions including Business Oulu among other. Selling of the idea of sales skills has proceeded very well indeed.

The University of Oulu Board of Directors accepted some time ago the launch of a new international ”Business Analytics” Master’s Program, to start in September 2021 as a joint offering of Oulu Business School and the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology. This unique program will focus on data-intensive analytics for business needs, so that a student can choose from three different degrees – Master of Science in Business Administration, Technology or Information Processing Science. We look forward to the program being of great interest for students, companies and other stakeholders.

As the new Vice Rector for Education of the University of Oulu, Dr. Tapio Koivu, will start his work on the first of July 2020, it is appropriate to invest in and make use of educational competences offered by the university – not only to degree students and for the three plus two years, but to many other and for their life-time.

Veikko Seppänen