Outline of the concept - Ideological perspective

It's been four months since we first met with our project partner at the Demola premises. Juha Suoranta, our project parter and the dean of the School of Education at the University of Tampere in Finland, emphasized in his rather vague initial requisitions that the school's external communication was in need of a reform. He was concerned about how the current ways of doing things would stack up in the future. He wanted for us to come up with an idea, a concept, that would serve to provide a better link between the School of Education and the public sphere.

Although the requisitions were very open to interpretation, and there were many directions that we could've taken, after some initial hurdles we did find a solid idea. It soon became quite obvious that the concern Suoranta was expressing reached a lot further into our society than the School of Education at the University of Tampere. In fact it didn't only reach to all of the schools in the university, but to all of education within our society as a whole. It became apparent that our system of education was not open, but closed: our much-praised system left much room for improvement.

The age of Internet and open communication, and the immense possibilities those have initiated, had still not reached the conventions of the classroom. Suddenly, in the light of the vagueness of the requisitions, our thought-horizon started to expand. We wanted to make a much bigger impact. We wanted to open education throughout the Finnish system of education, all the way from primary schools to academia.

As the long winter days are well on their way towards a sunnier season, our concept is looking really good. So good, in fact, that there has already been talks about developing the concept into a full nationwide service.

Our concept EduLeaks - a social video bank full of educational content - aims to make studying and teaching a lot easier and less stressful in Finland. EduLeaks will collect existing and scattered educational content from existing video services (such as YouTube and Vimeo), which will be organized according to Finnish curricula from primary schools to different schools and faculties of universities. After gathering this initial content, our affiliates and users will start to produce new content systemically - and at this point anyone will be able to benefit from our service, for free.

Anyone who will register to our service can link or produce Finnish educational videos, which will be collected in our service. The videos will be categorized to match the Finnish curricula, with the collaboration of the users and the administrators. The videos can also be searched with normal content-describing keywords, along with scrolling through the curricula. In addition the videos will also be organized in an order of difficulty, according to how difficult the video content of the topic is within the curricula. This way the users will be able to know what video content they should master before advancing to more demanding contents within the subject matter they're studying.

EduLeaks will be a social service in which crowdsourcing plays a significant role. Videos can be discussed in text-form and they can be voted according to functionality of the educational content. This voting will arrange the videos from a certain topic, so that the video containing the highest quality educational content from the topic will be the easiest to see on the page.

Basically, in EduLeaks anyone who has an Internet connection can study through the whole system of education in Finland as presented in the current curricula.

Our concept, as such, not only aims to open the external communication of the School of Education of the University of Tampere, but the external communication of the whole system of education in Finland. Our idea is not only providing answers for future demands of education, but it is itself creating the future of education.

Perhaps needless to say, our concept has also a lot of export potential.

PS: We managed to make one promotional video that outlines the main idea of our concept. The video is in Finnish and can be viewed from this private YouTube-link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbN8AiWXKec