The objective of the project is to respond to the know-how needs of sectors facing growth and restructuring with the open university education. The project promotes the working life oriented education of the open university and develops a sustainable operations model suitable for it with the help of three field-specific pilots and their evaluation. The pilots are carried out in the fields of ICT, social services and health care, and bioeconomy-environmental field.

The project partners include three universities of applied sciences, five universities and one enterprise, but during the project all the universities that arrange open university education in Finland are in collaboration. Central organisations like Akava, EK, KT, SAK, STTK, Suomen yrittäjät and local companies together with organisations of public sector are important partners in collaboration. It is a question of accelerating the already existing education system accordingly with the know-how needs for sectors subject to growth and structure changes.

The objective of the open university education is, during the project, to network better with the working life, to profile the strengths of universities and of universities of applied sciences and to arrange guidance and teaching in a more customer-oriented way. The launch of the pilots will be graded, which allows the operations model to be developed iteratively.

The pilots start with clarifying the needs of know-how and identifying the existing supply. New field-specific openings will be made in supply, guidance and learning environments if needed. The evaluation of different stages is in the core of each pilot and the results are used by the pilots of subsequent fields. The fields chosen to be piloted are in the sectors subject to growth and structure changes in which the needs of know-how can be achieved with the contents of degree studies and in which the needs for the know-how will be considerable during the next few years. In order to have a diverse experiment of the operations model, the piloted fields are chosen to be divergent. In the ICT field answering
the needs of the already highly educated is emphasized and the challenge of the open university education is to arrange more advanced studies and to carry out project type studies in cooperation with companies. In the social services and health care the challenge is in the growth of know-how demands and in the digitalisation of services.The
supply of the studies of bioeconomy and environmental field in the open university education is minor compared to other fields, in other words the supply of the open university education of the bioeconomy will be increased as an open university network for those already working within the bioeconomics and will also be added to other fields. This way operational preconditions are provided to the business which requires the knowledge of bioeconomy. In all the pilots the methods of implementation are designed to be as flexible as possible, in other words, both the guidance and the open university education will be carried out in the learning environments which utilise information and communication technology.

The result of the project is an operations model in which the open universities and universities of applied sciences will work as a cooperation network carrying out working life oriented open university education and also in which the know-how modules of different fields are defined and reformed regularly with central organisations of working life.