The summer is about to end and it’s time to sum up our work on the Digital Leap project. During the summer, we all focused on different tasks depending on the goals of our respective courses. The tasks included: typing text into the MOOC platform (both in Finnish and in English) and making figures, exercises and videos – to name but a few.

We find the project very important since by utilizing the MOOC platform we can offer students a number of learning methods that cannot be implemented in traditional contact teaching. But it was not always straightforward to transform lecture courses into online courses. There were many obstacles and problems that interfered with our work. To begin with, the formatting of text and equations in the MOOC’s text editor was anything but simple. Secondly, the copyright policies increased our workload because we were to ask for permissions to reuse figures or make new illustrations ourselves. Nevertheless, we managed to overcome most barriers by helping each other and consulting our superiors.

We learned a number of things during our summer work: For instance, we noticed that it really is worth concentrating on one task at a time, or you will feel dizzy and won’t know what to do next. Further, it was surprising to notice how much resources are required when creating online courses. We were able to learn something new about the course contents, too, since we spent a lot of time reading, translating and retyping the course materials.

We did substantial progress during the summer, but the courses are yet to be completed. Luckily, the project will continue until summer 2020, so there is still plenty of time to enhance and finish the work. We hope that these courses will be of use to many students for years to come.

Mikael, Robin, Sofia & Joonatan

summer students 2019

Digital Leap of the Master’s Programme in Atmospheric Sciences (ATM-MP)