At the municipality level, depending on the size of the municipality, there usually exists an educational department or office responsible for governing education. The size of municipalities varies heavily from the Finnish capital of Helsinki (657,674 citizens, approx. 50,000 basic education students) to the small town of Luhanka (699 citizens, approx. 100 basic education students). The education departments also have personnel responsible for ICT use in education. These departments are strongly collaborating with other departments such as the IT department that runs the municipality’s IT ecosystem and infrastructure. Together, these two departments are, in many municipalities, responsible for what IT services are used in schools. They are also responsible for in-service training and piloting new practices.

Finnish municipalities offer good IT services. Nowadays one rarely has to physically go to a helpdesk or book time for a dentist or renew their library book loan. This culture of seamlessness in IT infrastructures has been ongoing since the 90’s, and it is perhaps linked to the fact that Finland is quite rural and digitalisation was seen as a solution to deliver equal access to services and to knowledge for all. 

The case is similar for schools; IT services are offered to all education stakeholders. For instance, a student management system called Wilma, is both a web- and app-based software to present a simple front-end for parents to interact with the school, to gain information about students’ learning progress, and to read important daily messages. It also presents a different interface for teachers who use it to input grades, draft certificates, and input administrative data such as student absenteeism.

Since schools represent the city and the public authority, they usually cannot make purchase decisions without an open bid for vendors and suppliers. This ensures fair competition among suppliers, and that the offer meets certain criteria. The process is transparent thus avoiding risks for misuse or corruption. In most municipalities, before purchasing an educational technology, a school must first consult their educational department.

Note that many of the municipalities have their own unique processes for technology implementation that may differ from what is presented here. However, all municipalities must ensure purchases are done in accordance with the law, and that the process is fair and transparent. (i.e. education). 

Earlier, municipalities purchased educational technology in a more top-down process. With the absence of the teacher’s perspective, this might have led purchases based rather on technical capabilities and omitting pedagogical aspects. 

Yet it soon became evident that when teachers do not contribute to the decision of what technology to purchase, it was less likely that they will actually use those new tools. How to involve teachers and students in the decision-making, those that know best how to use technology in the classroom? 

One way can be to gather data from teachers (e.g. via surveys). The school head can help with collecting this data which can then be used to make a quick thematic analysis for the education department of the municipality. The municipality can also make decisions based on data gathered from tutor teachers. In Finland, the schools have a tutor teacher in every school who is responsible for the pedagogical development of the school and is well informed about educational technologies. Of course, the education department also consults the municipality’s IT department because new software and devices must suit the municipality’s IT infrastructure. 

There are many ways to involve teachers and students when making decisions about educational technology purchases. However, it would be wise to standardize this process and to get all stakeholders, teachers, students and vendors to truly participate in this process. 

The city of Helsinki has introduced an interesting way that both involves teachers and students in the selection and purchase of new educational technology yet still acting in accordance with the law. Since Helsinki introduced this new process, many other large cities have also adopted a similar process. The key idea is to create a list of challenges defined by teacher panels. 

For instance, some teachers in a school may report that they need a digital solution to facilitate formative assessment. These teachers would be expected to define certain criteria. For example, that the products should include an informative learning analytics back-end for the teacher, an interesting user interface, it should support any device, etc. Then the educational department drafts an official announcement or “Call for Ideas” aimed for vendors, start-ups and for more institutionalized companies to provide solutions to meet these criteria.

 After the official call, vendors pitch their ideas and wireframe products and beta versions to the teacher panel. The panel then decides what vendor(s) to go for to create their product further together with schools. In this piloting phase, teachers and students can participate to varying product development cycles thus making sure whatever the vendor is designing and coding, actually meets the end-user demands – the needs of students and teachers.

In short, when vendors include end-users (e.g., teachers, students) in product development at an early stage, the products will be taken up by more teachers and students.

Finnish schools managed to deliver education in challenging circumstances due to COVID-19. Since municipalities had invested in digitalisation, schools had enough digital learning environments set up before COVID-19. One of these digital learning environments was ViLLE that teachers and students widely used for distance learning to provide possibilities for formative assessment with the help of this digital tool. 

ViLLE is a digital learning platform used for creating adaptive learning tasks in the form of digital games and set automated feedback. The popularity of the platform took new heights during Spring 2020, when COVID-19 hit the educational sector hard, globally pushing schools to distance learning methods. 

Teachers can simply start using ViLLE in the so-called sandbox mode where they can try different functions and test how the learning material in ViLLE works. After initial testing, teachers can create a virtual class, invite students to join the class and create learning tasks for the students. Teachers can also use ready-made learning material created by other ViLLE users for mathematics, programming, Finnish and English.

Trying out new software for learning may give the end-user an overview of how the environment in general works. However, introducing new educational technology and getting teachers to use it on daily basis requires a thorough training. One should also make sure that teachers feel they are involved and their questions and worries regarding the use of technology is being heard. Therefore, training is offered for teachers because not all teachers are familiar with adaptive learning environments or know how to create virtual classes or how to conduct digital formative assessment. For ViLLE, teachers are offered training by the Finnish company Eduten or by local teachers licensed to train others to use the ViLLE system. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, ViLLE has been tested extensively in Finnish comprehensive schools to provide teachers and students with the necessary distance learning materials. During the pandemic the ViLLE team also provided training through video conferencing to safely deliver teachers the necessary information.

The number of ViLLE users and tasks completed on ViLLE’s learning platform quadrupled during the pandemic in Spring 2020. During the distance learning period, some teachers used ViLLE to deliver both learning material, and to conduct formative assessment. Teachers were especially interested in receiving more accurate information about students’ learning and tailoring the level of difficulty of the given exercises in ViLLE to match the student’s skill level.

Studies showed that Finnish schools had already adopted either Microsoft Office 365 and/or Google G Suite that together with the Wilma student administration system, delivered all the necessary digital learning environments, video conferencing and digital portfolio tools. In addition, schools used ViLLE to deliver digital learning material to students, which also provided teachers with formative assessment capabilities. During the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers in Finland but also in many other European countries, have reported that they systematically had issues with conducting assessment in distance learning. In Finland, teachers sought digital educational game tools such as ViLLE to tackle this issue.