Global Media Education through development of Online Teaching

The project “Global Media Education through Development of Online Teaching” seeks to develop a joint study course on Global Media Education through collaborative knowledge exchange between experts from Finland and China. This project realises that we live in the post-industrial information age which is characterised by the ubiquitous and globalised usage of digital technologies in all aspects of social reality. The rapid changes in the global society set the need to educate university students and our future workforce on global issues of media education from intercultural and multilingual perspectives.
The University of Lapland, Finland and the Education University of Hong Kong (EdUHK), China have been working previously towards ongoing common goals in the UNITWIN/UNESCO Network on Teacher Education for Social Justice and Diversity in Education, the first UNITWIN network coordinated by Finland (University of Lapland), since its established in 2018. The network activities are funded with grants from several sources. Within the network there are smaller theme groups in which members with similar expertise and interests collaborate. University of Lapland and EdUKH work together in the theme group of Online and Rural Education, organising comparative research, symposiums and webinars. The objective of this project is to deepen and strengthen the existing collaboration between the University of Lapland and the selected units of EdUHK into a solid one and answer to local, national and global education goals of sustainable development, understanding education and citizenship competencies in digitalisation to be part of these intentions. Therefore, we seek to connect the diverse knowhow of the partners; expertise on media education, intercultural and multilingual education, digital technologies in teaching and learning and qualitative research from the University of Lapland and expertise on intercultural and global communication, Artificial Intelligence literacy and quantitative research from EdUHK. Through collaboration we seek to design a joint course on global media, to jointly construct a high quality education provision, and progress in our common respective fields in digital education from institutionalized perspectives. Simultaneously, our aim is to develop online education teaching methods, thereby increasing the quality of higher education offered online, and achieving the set learning objectives. This project promotes and enables not only the knowledge exchange on the topic of global media education, but the development of a new pedagogical model concerning online teaching in today’s intercultural and global society context.
New online teaching pedagogies are vital for the advancement of teaching and learning particularly in remote areas of both participating countries. Online teaching has the power to combat long distances and facilitate students’ interaction asynchronously and synchronously, supporting the learning process. With this project we seek sustainable development to achieve better and meaningful to the students online learning and provide tools to achieve equality in online education.