The Ministry of Education and Culture has granted a special funding to support students’ well-being and study progress

The Ministry of Education and Culture has granted a special funding for OMA OTE and HALI-projects that focus on supporting the well-being of students and the progress of their studies during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, five students’ unions, including Laurea’s students’ union Laureamko, O’Diako, Metka, Helga and TUO, were granted a cofounding for a project aiming to develop new ways to improve students’ communality and inclusion in the community of universities of applied sciences during social distancing.

The OMA OTE project aims to support every student of Laurea

The OMA OTE Supporting students’ agency for well-being and study progress during COVID-19 at Laurea project aims to strengthen students' experience of life management and their own well-being, and to support them in planning their studies. The project will be implemented as a multi-stakeholder and multi-professional collaboration so that it reaches students from Laurea's different campuses.

The project takes students’ individual needs into account by providing them different types of guidance services on basic, complementary and enhanced levels. The project utilizes the basic services that already exist and launches new services, such as How are you? -Zoom support and walks to support well-being.

In addition, the aim of the project is to reach and help students who are at risk of dropping out and students who have fallen behind on their studies due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The project will continue until the end of the year 2021. To follow the process of the project see the process portfolio from the project website.

The HALI project focuses on specific issues of hospitality management students

The HALI project led by Haaga-Helia aims to improve guidance and wellbeing of students by employing service design tools. The project’s primary customers are hospitality management students of Haaga-Helia and Laurea. Haaga-Helia’s students’ union Helga is a project partner of HALI.
 
The hospitality industry has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Due to the pandemic, hospitality internships have been cancelled and students have not been able to attend internships required in their degree. The situation was extremely challenging in Spring 2020 and there is still a significant loss in available positions in the hospitality industry. Fatigue and distress among students have grown remarkably during the pandemic.
 
The project consists of multiple parallel activities, all based on a needs assessment. The aim of the project is to increase the availability of student wellbeing services and to develop new services to meet the growing need. The new services are developed in co-operation with students and staff by employing service design tools.

More information about the HALI-project:

Heikki Ursin, project manager in Haaga-Helia, firstname.lastname@haaga-helia.fi
Annukka Korvenranta, project manager in Laurea, firstname.lastname@laurea.fi

More information: