When communities worldwide were closed in the spring of 2020 as the COVID-19 disease pandemic hit the world, the consequences for higher education in Europe were extensive. In a flash, higher education activities were moved online without enough time for neither preparation nor planning. Both students and the universities' staff had to adapt to major changes in daily life. Follow-ups and evaluations showed that the universities coped with the change surprisingly well, but also that the challenges in teaching and learning were many, both for students and staff – this shows the newly Arcada and Ditepract published Best Practice Guide on the topic.
Arcada’s investment in the new learning and research environments is making strong progress in response to the rapid digital development in society. The support from foundations, companies and private persons has been great and thanks to this, the environments have come a long way, some almost to the finish line.
At Arcada, a knowledge centre is emerging, where digital business and service solutions are developed and tested towards the goal of making them safe and accessible to everyone. The centre will be a meeting platform for students, researchers and business representatives, with curiosity and knowledge as keywords.
Being able to recognise an emergency, call for help and start resuscitation can be the difference between life and death in a sudden cardiac arrest. Arcada University of Applied Sciences participates in the Kids Save Lives project that teaches children how to act in emergency situations.
Arcada introduces digital twins in its research and education to support Finnish industry in the long term towards cost-effective and sustainable solutions.
During two weeks, students from Arcada University of Applied Sciences and Kristiania University College in Norway gathered for a new course in Integrated Business Planning. The course is a unique collaboration between the higher education institutions with the aim of exchanging cross-border knowledge in a new subject.
Along with eight other universities of applied sciences, Arcada offers Ukrainians who have fled the war a free-of-charge preparatory programme for higher education. The programme is made possible through the PrepProg project and with support from the Ministry of Education and Culture.
Finland is in the process of change in our health care system. The Nordic well-fare system is challenged in Finland, for instance, due to difficulties in attracting nurses, changing demographics in Finland, and a general pressure to reduce costs in the whole public sector. This poses severe challenges for the entire healthcare sector. Can Machine Learning (i.e., the subfield of Artificial Intelligence, which focuses on having a machine imitate intelligent human behavior) be used to understand relationships between different critical properties of our healthcare system? Yes, it can! An excellent example of how this can be done is found in a scientific paper by Hu et al. (2020), where the authors investigated nurses' willingness to report errors in a specific geographical area of the US.
