Students stand at the core of learning environment development at UEF. We are creating the best academic learning environment in Finland, one that is built around a high standard of education, inspirational teaching methods, open learning, comfortable facility solutions and modern technology. The university's Pedagogical Development Team works to strengthen teachers’ digital skills and supports students’ wishes for studying flexibly, irrespective of place.
News about education and learning environments
Comfortable facilities
Our campuses in Joensuu and Kuopio are compact, with all the lecture rooms, facilities for independent study, and campus restaurants conveniently nearby. This makes it effortless for our students to move about on campus.
Our renovation projects are carried out with modifiability in mind, and our campus facilities are equipped with ergonomic and easily movable pieces of furniture. Our simulation rooms offer realistic settings for our students to practice the skills they need in their future professions. The newly renovated lobbies and corridors of our campus buildings offer opportunities for independent study, or simply for hanging out with fellow students.
Interaction between students and staff is smooth and characterised by a low hierarchy, and the university’s student associations collaborate across discipline boundaries.
Flexible studying
We are constantly developing flexible modes of study, open learning, and diverse opportunities for completing courses. We encourage open learning through openly accessible online courses, the Open University and other openly accessible learning materials. You can learn about our academic offering for example by completing one of our freely available Massive Open Online Courses, MOOCs.
We are constantly developing our teaching practices. Teaching methods are selected to align with the course content, often allowing for greater flexibility in teaching and learning.
We use, for example, the Flipped Classroom approach in our teaching. Flipped Classroom refers to inverted instruction: before coming to class, students familiarise themselves with the subject matter with the help of videos or other materials, and the actual class time is devoted to students’ insightful and challenging questions. This way, the focus is shifted from teacher-centred teaching employed on mass lectures to student-centred learning.
Pedagogical Development Team
The Pedagogical Development Team at the University of Eastern Finland develops interactive teaching and guidance methods that support learning.
The team provides pedagogical and technical peer support for the teaching staff and supports students’ desires for flexible learning, regardless of their location. This is a way for the university to strengthen students skills in remote work, which are becoming increasingly central in the world of work.
Each teacher in the Pedagogical Development Team has their own area of expertise, which they share through networks across faculty boundaries.
New technologies for learning
We are creating and developing a culture of technology that enables seamless collaboration between students’ own devices and the university’s technological solutions. Our university lecturers specialising in pegagogical development, together with the university's experts in educational and digital services, are brainstorming, developing and testing the best technological solutions for education.
Our Smart Location Classrooms (SLCs) enable a completely new type of distance teaching and learning between our campuses. Our Sm4rtLab, on the other hand, brings together science and education through augmented reality labs that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. These labs are used in, e.g., the fields of photonics and biology.
