Designing and producing digital video-supported cases with students: how to make it happen?

This paper focuses on how a traditional lecture-based university level course on network management at the University of Lapland was developed into a course in which the teacher designed and produced digital video-supported cases with the help of students and both local and inter-university support services. The cases functioned as the learning material for the students enrolled in the online version of the course. The objectives of this project were to develop the teaching-studying-learning (TSL) processes used in Network Management course in order to better support meaningful learning, as well as correspond to a) the requirements in the working life, and b) the mobile studying possibilities afforded by the laptop computers that every new degree student at the University of Lapland has been given a change to obtain. Designing and producing digital video-supported cases with students has clearly proven to be a worthwhile project which will also be implemented in the future realizations of the course. Collaboration with students and the support services contributed to the teacher’s professional development, and with respect to students it turned her role into that of an active co-learner. The teacher was able to evaluate how the method helped her motivate and guide the students, improve communication with students, and reorganise study materials in an online learning environment. The contextualness and activeness of the TSL process can be supported by the method. For a more in depth assessment of how the method supports meaningful learning, the student perspective is crucial.