Company involved in new project at Karlstad University

TeliaSonera, Effect Management and Standard Solutions Group participate in use.it – a new project to develop online courses in the field of service innovations. The project, run by the School of Economics and the Center for Service Research (CTF) at Karlstad University, has been granted three million kroner from the KK foundation.

The School of Economics and the Center for Service Research (CTF) at Karlstad University currently have a close collaboration regarding education at undergraduate and advanced level.

"The teaching has mostly been focused on full-time studies on site at the university. We want to change this," says project manager Jörg Pareigis at the School of Economics.

The goal of the project "use.it - online training in the service area" is to develop four online courses over a two-year period, which will contribute to skills development in companies. The four courses are: Service Logic, Understanding Customer Experiences, Service innovation and Service Business – strategy and operations. The project's purpose is also to contribute to a faster dissemination and use of research results in business.

"We will invest in developing tools and competence around online learning and open learning resources, so-called "open educational resources". These include various learning platforms, film recordings, on-line meetings, simulation tools and interactive web-seminars. In addition to developing and testing various IT-based tools, we also want to raise the educational quality. We will use both expertise within the university and bring in experiences from international networks, says Jörg Pareigis.

The methods and tools developed within the project for online education will also be able to be used in other courses within the School of Economics at Karlstad University.

Service innovations are a central area of research at the Center for Service Research (CTF), not least through the long-term KK profile Service Innovation for Sustainable Business. CTF's research forms the basis for the development of the courses within the "use.it - online education in the service area" project. The project is part of the KK foundation's initiative "IT in higher education."