Företagsuniversitetet is one of Sweden's leading companies in the business of organizing seminars and events for professionals. Every year 6 000 people walk through the doors of Företagsuniversitetet – and leave brimming with innovative thinking and updated knowledge, ready to use the minute they return to the workplace. The majority of the seminars and events has been in a physical classroom up until the beginning of 2020.
When the pandemic hit, Företagsuniversitetet faced the same challenge as many other companies providing and organizing seminars and events. How can we switch from the physical classroom to the digital? A change that needed to happen already the same week to not cancel any further seminars.
The challenge for Företagsuniversitetet and many others is that the digital space is a relatively unknown area, which raises a lot of questions and uncertainty. Företagsuniversitetet is exceptionally good at arranging learning events in the physical space and has therefore not had a reason to explore the digital arenas.
A plan was required to make this change fast. We needed to identify what tools to use, what new processes needs to be created and how we as humans adapt to these new conditions. Even if the change is triggered by unfortunate circumstances, we can probably all state that the shift we are making now will create many new opportunities, ideas and valuable lessons for the future.
For us and for many of our industry colleagues, spring of 2020 meant that we quickly needed to change our courses from 'live on site' to distance learning events. Since Knowly has been delivering digital complements to our courses for a couple of years now, it was natural to ask them for help to quickly transform a number of courses into distance in times of covid-19. It has been a pleasure to collaborate with Knowly on this. They are knowledgeable, innovative, fast and extremely fun to work with!
Stefan Haglund, CEO, Företagsuniversitetet
Knowly's customer success team together with Företagsuniversitetet started off the transformation by defining a common objective, identifying the immediate needs and priorities. A common goal of offering every possible seminar digital instead of cancelling. It was clear that the change affects several stakeholders with different needs.
We had three stakeholder groups with different needs:
We went straight to work and started converting their first training Sustainable Lending. By doing so, it became clear what will be required in each education that follows.
The first insight into the pedagogical structure is that the videoconferencing meeting cannot be as long as when we do classroom training. In order for the participants to be able to leave the training with the same knowledge, the structure must therefore be adjusted. It will no longer be "nice to have" to work with preparatory activities and subsequent work, but it will definitely be "need to have".
We identified which activities need to take place in groups and which can take place individually together. Together with the responsible teacher, we identified which different sections were of a more informative nature, which were more of a discussion nature and which were of a more reflective nature.
Tools Företagsuniversitetet uses in their transformation to the digital arena:
Many of us have learned more about how we can use digital tools in one week than we have in years.
Teacher at Företagsuniversitetet
Supporting Företagsuniversitetet in making this change has given us lots of learnings. There will be continued intensive work to implement the conversion of physical classroom training into digital. An important thing to highlight is that even if the change came to us quickly and due to unfortunate circumstances, we can already state that many positive things will come as a result.