How to Improve Students’ Learning in LUT - Faults of the current system

Have you ever thought about how inefficient it is to wake up at seven o'clock in the morning and try to drag your tired body into the lecture hall? And just to listen the teacher speaking about some fancy stuff that is not going to be asked in an exam. After all the grades are  most students’ motivator to study. Well, you're not probably the only one. In fact, there is no research that this "sitting and listening" learning method is in any way a best method  to get people more educated. So why do we still do that? We need a change. For example I’ve found online lessons and tasks very efficient learning method but there is still quite limited amount of online courses especially in the field of economics. Thumbs up for LUT for making a major progress in this.

Few points about the group tasks. In my first year in Lappeenranta we made several group tasks for example in marketing  but there is something that really bothered me afterwards. That is the division of work. Usually, you study your own part of the work quite well but the parts your team members do are mostly forgotten. So if we have four students in one group task, each student learns a whopping 25 percent of the entire work. At least that's my personal experience of the group working. Of course the benefits of the group working is the problem solving together and the interactivity between students but something has to be done differently. Maybe we could force the students to study the entire subject of the work by adding some kind of test to the end of the group task. For example the teacher could interview the group personally about the subject and the project in general. I do not know would it make a difference but it’s worth trying.

I agree that we need to get rid of the examinations in our schools in Finland as LUT is currently doing. We need to make our study more independent of time and place and it is good that LUT has taken it to one of its goals. If we really want to improve our education system we need to approach learning in more scientific way. It is proven for example that interaction between people, playing in school during breaks and exercising develops brain more than "sitting and listening” because only a few people can concentrate on listening for a long period of time. It is also said that sitting and listening bores people especially younger children which causes anxiety which causes stress in the body which is a major factor in many diseases and disorders. There is just no point to  study to forget. We need to take advantage of our modern information-based technology and move to the new era. We need to gather smart and influential people to really discuss and refine our society and build a new kind of learning environment which is based on scientific facts. Main goal is to harvest the real potential and creativity of human beings. Here is an interesting video about school and creativity for the final lightening: https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity

Text by Samuli Heikkilä, a student of Independent Study in English course