There is a high demand of cloud technologies professionals on the job market (Ahola and Aunimo 2021). This need was identified by several European countries. Universities and other educational institutions, chambers of commerce and consulting services from five different countries joined their forces to create new study offerings on cloud services.

Dihub created a hub for students, educators and businesses

The Dihub-project created a hub model for fostering innovations and for sharing knowledge on cloud services. The stakeholders of the hub are educational institutions, businesses using cloud services, chambers of commerce and other mediating institutions, as well as cloud service technology providers.

The hub was first described at the INTED conference in 2021 (Aunimo, Hytönen, Ahola, Hokkanen and Häkkinen 2021). The hub did offer numerous webinars for students, businesses and educators around Europe during the project. The hub also served as a point of contact for businesses willing to experiment with cloud technologies as it connected businesses with project work courses.

One example of such a cooperation was the cooperation between Hotelway, Haaga-Helia University of Applied Sciences and the Higher Institute of Engineering of the Polytechnic of Oporto (Aunimo 2021).

Study offerings related to cloud services

 The project offered the opportunity to create and pilot new cloud services related study offerings. First the study offerings were augmented with technologies offered by the Amazon Web Services (Ahola and Aunimo 2021). After that, an entire study path on cloud services was created and the cooperation with commercial cloud service providers was augmented with Azure (Aunimo and Camara 2021).

After piloting the new cloud study offerings in several partner countries, the Dihub cloud curriculum was created as a joint effort of three of the educational partners (Aunimo, Brkljalic, Lingtilä, Camara and Mrsic 2022).

The main contributions of the project are twofold:

• A European network of educators, businesses, mediating organizations and cloud service providers.
• New and enhanced study offerings on cloud services in each of the participating educational institutions.

The consortium is now ready to continue to the next level of challenges. This may be the creation of a European MOOC on cloud services and the creation of start-ups where innovations are enabled by cloud technologies.

Publications by Haaga-Helians during the project:    

• Ahola H. and Aunimo L.  2021. Pilvipalveluiden osaajia tarvitaan Euroopassa. e-Signals, Haaga-Helia.
• Ahola H. and Aunimo L. 2021.  Pilvipalveluiden osaajan opintopolku. e-Signals, Haaga-Helia.
• Aunimo L.  2021. Students Implementing Chatbots in the IBM Cloud Platform. e-Signals, Haaga-Helia.
• Aunimo L., Brkljalic M., Lingtilä T., Camara A. and Mrsic L. 2022. Curriculum development for cloud services: Answering the needs of the job market. Accepted for publication in EDULEARN2022 Proceedings. 14th annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies, 4-6 July, 2022. International Association of Technology Education and Development.
• Aunimo L and Camara A. 2021. The Dihub Study Path Creates Cloud Specialists. eSignals. Haaga-Helia.
• Aunimo L., Hytönen J., Ahola H., Hokkanen H., Häkkinen K. 2021. The DIHUB model for learning and innovating, in INTED2021 Proceedings. International Association of Technology Education and Development.

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