Promoting the global sales of educational products from Northern Ostrobothnia: ScalED-project

This thesis has formed hand in hand with a cooperative project for education export development. The project is called ScalED – Scalable Education Solutions for Global Markets. The author has worked on this project as a project expert. The thesis has motivated to gather a theoretical background and apply research knowledge to project work. The work aims to promote the global sales of digital educational products from Northern Ostrobothnia. More specifically, the actions concentrate on promoting the area's public-private cooperation in the education export industry and writing a report about the current state and development needs of digital education solutions for global markets. The research process is qualitative and based on an Action Research methodology. the work does not aim at statistically significant representativeness but seeks to identify the factors that explain the problem areas related to the topic. Action Research is a research strategy that aims to influence the subject, its activities, or the environment in order to develop and improve them. This project promotes the co-production of digital educational solutions with workshops. The cooperation of operators was observed during the process, and findings were combined with other data to form a conclusion about the current state and development needs. The research data is collected mainly by participant observation method whilst working on a project and covert observation whilst organising the project events. Prior surveys and surveys made during the project are also used as research data material. In addition, the project consultant is interviewed as a senior expert. The data is analysed by triangulation. The data results are gathered to form a working report about the current state and development needs of organisations in the Northern Ostrobothnia region in scalable digital education solutions. The report will be published in OAMK Journal. The result of the work answered the project goals. It highlighted the cooperation between operators on education export in the Northern Ostrobothnia region, and how it can be promoted. As a result of the workshops, three products of the six product templates continued developing further, towards market testing. These products act as a demo of cooperational products and will be presented on the PINO Networks website. The bottlenecks in the development of educational institutes' education export were identified as organisations' internal development needs. The recommendations for strategic planning, cooperation between faculties and needed resources were published in the working report as a solution to these findings. As a result of the action research process, the cooperation between the region's operators strengthened and the activity around education export was raised. As an associated result, the regional cooperation committee has decided to agree on a contract to ensure the continuation of cooperation and coproduction in the future