Planning a Fitness Course for KAMK Sports

The objective of this practice-based thesis, which included also quantitative and qualitative research methods, was to plan KAMK Sports an informative fitness course focusing on different fitness disciplines in Finland, which would be suitable for both, the students who already have experience from strength training and possibly also from competitive fitness as well as for those who might not have much experience from those or have no experience at all. The course is suitable for all students, but only those students that can include the course to their studies will also get free choice study credits from it. The course was planned by following the new product development and the new service development frameworks. The information needed for the course contents was searched and collected from different reliable sources, including for example different books written by professionals from the competitive fitness field and websites of the official national and international federations operating in the field. In addition, a quantitative research method in a form of an online questionnaire was used as a part of the planning process to give the potential participants of the course an opportunity to participate to the planning process of the course. Also, a qualitative research method will be used after the actual implementation of the course to collect feedback, which will be used to change and develop the course for its next implementation. The first implementation of the course will most likely take place during the spring semester 2019, which is why the successfulness of the course can not be evaluated yet. However, the course materials, including the lecture materials, plans for each contact session, and all the tasks and exercises are now ready for KAMK Sports’ implementation of the course, and they are all planned so that they also take into consideration the needs and wishes of the students of Kajaani University of Applied Sciences (in other words, the customers). For this reason, as well as because the topic of the course is very current, the course is very likely to be successful. The course will last for 1-2 months depending on how often there will eventually be contact lessons, and if it gets positive feedback, it will be organized again at some point