Industry Project 2025/2026: Forum4Edu
- Jul 24
- 4 min read
The IDBM Industry Project Course is a seven-month journey of collaboration, exploration, and innovation, where students addressing real-world challenges in collaboration with our industry partners. This year, we’re inviting you to follow 10 different stories as our teams move through different stages of their project journeys.
Teacher platform for teachers’ teaching
Our project with our partner Forum4Edu explored a question that many people outside academia rarely think about: How can the work of improving teaching become more visible, collaborative, and recognised?
While research outputs are published, cited, and rewarded, much of the work behind developing courses or teaching often happens behind the scenes. Our challenge was not simply to design another digital platform, but to understand why teachers rarely share their work in the first place.
We, a team of 5 IDBM’ers, started by trying to understand the everyday reality of higher education teachers. Together with Forum4Edu, we held workshops to define the problem space before conducting interviews with teachers, educational developers, and institutional stakeholders across Finland and elsewhere in Europe.
The teachers, and how we found them
As part of our user research conducted in Finland, we travelled to Barcelona and Lisbon to meet teachers and department heads from various universities as well as visiting educational technology conferences. The trip allows us to step outside the brief and into a new cultural context. Seeing how academics and institutions across Europe are approaching pedagogical challenges.
Many of the solutions we encountered focused on learning platforms, or administrative efficiency. We noticed that much less attention was given to supporting teachers themselves as collaborators and their role of creators of pedagogical knowledge.
Just as importantly, the trip gave our team time to reflect together. Many of the conversations that shaped the direction of the project happened outside conference halls, over dinners, during long walks through the cities.
EdTech conference in Barcelona Spain & Visit to Lisbon Portugal
Very quickly, we realised that the challenge was much bigger than technology. Teachers consistently described the same obstacles: limited time, uncertainty about sharing unfinished work, and a lack of recognition for the effort they invest in developing their teaching. Many improved their courses continuously, but most of that work stayed invisible outside their own classrooms.
One question kept following us throughout the project:
How do you encourage collaboration when everyone is already busy?
Our solution and vision for teaching pedagogy
Back in Finland, we began translating our research into different design directions. The concepts that kept coming up in our research and interviews were: mentoring between teachers, having a teaching portfolio, or recognising pedagogical work. Through continuous discussions with Forum4Edu, we designed a platform with incentive structure, trust, and long-term sustainability built in. Why would teachers join? What would motivate them to share their ideas? How could quality be maintained while keeping participation accessible? These questions stayed with us until the very end and reminded us that designing for higher education means designing for people, institutions, and cultures simultaneously.
The result, Teacher Square. Rather than functioning as another repository for teaching materials, Teacher Square is built around collaborative "sprints". Teachers facing similar teaching challenges come together for a short, structured collaborative course, where they co-design ideas, test them in their own classrooms, and reflect on the outcomes. The result for the participating teachers is that their ideas and learnings become published, as citable open educational resources.
The goal is simple: make professional development part of teachers' everyday work instead of something they have to find extra time for. Throughout the project we also realised that recognition matters just as much as collaboration.
Many teachers told us that documenting teaching development is difficult and that pedagogical work often carries little weight compared to research achievements. Teacher Square tracks learnings and includes them in a personal teacher portfolio. Helping teacher’s provide a partially filled out portfolio for when they apply for promotion or other positions.
Impact Gala and Reflection
For the final presentation at Impact Gala, we showcased both our research and the Teacher Square prototype platform. Visitors could explore the platform, learn about the interview insights, and try an interactive teacher archetype quiz that introduced different teaching profiles we had identified throughout the project.
Looking back, one of the biggest lessons from the project was that meaningful innovation rarely starts with a solution. It starts by understanding the underlying system that causes challenges.
What began as a platform brief became an exploration of academic culture, collaboration, recognition, and professional identity. Along the way, we learned that improving higher education is not only about designing better digital tools, but about creating conditions where teachers can learn from one another. Creating a system for teachers to share their expertise, and receive recognition for work that has often remained invisible.
The journey with Form4Edu has truly been collaborative, just like the platform we created. We're grateful to Forum4Edu for trusting us throughout the Capstone journey and for encouraging us to explore, question, and challenge our assumptions together.
Learn more about the team:
Anna Parkkinen (IDBM ENG)
Anna Sofia Starck (IDBM ARTS)
Bayonle Adelakun (IDBM BIZ)
Lino Luigi Faglia (IDBM ENG)
Ting Loetaphirom (IDBM ARTS)
