University campuses offer unique opportunities for sustainability since universities can often be in the cutting edge of development and experimentation and part of their task is to nurture future experts and leaders. By serving as testing grounds for sustainable solutions and by offering concrete examples for sustainability university campuses can help to promote more sustainable society in general.

There was a need to promote developing campus sustainability and to meet this need a massive open online course (MOOC) focused on campus sustainability was created. My thesis project supported an international team in creating the course MOOC for Sustainability: Empowering Global Campuses. In this reflection I go over the work, some of the challenges we had, and what I believe to be the most consequential aspect of the work.

For the project I set myself two goals: supporting in the course design with service design and introducing service design to the team. While aiding in the course design was no means trivial, the second goal was more challenging. The difficulty was because service design only tends to make sense after “you’ve done service design”.  Additional difficulty was that I could not give examples of how service design could help in MOOC design because I had not previously been part of making a MOOC. One of the benefits of this project is that there are now examples of service design being used in MOOC design and future service designers can now lean into this experience.

Originally the plan was to gather feedback from learners during a pilot phase and use them both to further develop the course as a part of the thesis. Unfortunately, there was a change in plans that meant that this was no longer possible. This of course was not an ideal situation, and it meant that we lost a valuable viewpoint when developing the course.

It also meant that I lost a major part of the plan for my thesis, and I had to readjust my approach. However, what I find interesting and encouraging is that looking back at my notes I readjusted quickly. I believe that this was still a valuable learning experience because changes can happen with any project and learning how to readjust is a valuable skill in its own right. As a replacement I decided to utilise autoethnography to bring a learner’s viewpoint to the project.

Methods and findings

In the work we used personas, the value proposition canvas, and journey mapping as well as autoethnography as mentioned.

The starting point for the work were our personas. I used an AI to generate several learner personas to serve as examples and to have a foundation to build on. This immediately produced results and gave us insights into the types of learners we had not previously recognised. We then chose four to be developed further with a workshop and for use in the course design. AI was used in this project like an instant brainstorming session, but the limitations of AI became apparent very quickly as many of the responses were repetitive. While AI has clearly progressed leaps and bounds in a very short time humans are still needed to spot the relevant results, develop them further, and apply the results.

The next step was to use the personas with value proposition canvas to see what value the course could bring to the learners. We found that the course should be firmly grounded in practice, perhaps through case studies, inspiration and outreach is important, and that strategy and building long-lasting culture sustainability should be addressed. The course should also provide “road signs” and point learners to other resources for deeper learning if the learner is interested.

Journey mapping allowed us to explore different learners’ experiences in various stages of them taking the course. For example, we investigated how different learners find about the course and found that the main way to market the course was through email and that the emails spread through networks. Those networks might not reach everyone, and that special care should be placed on making sure that the course reaches as many people as possible.

The final service design method in the project was autoethnography. Autoethnography is of course only one person’s subjective experience and thus has its limits. With this in mind however, the exercise brought good results and lessons for future projects. The two main findings were that for good course there needs to be strong direction and that the content that the contributors produce is properly integrated. Secondly, there should always be time for testing no matter how much of a hurry there is.

Overall, the project was a success, despite the changes midway, and we gained insights in using service design methods and approaches in MOOC design.

Invisible successes

One of the most consequential findings of the work was the distinction between completion and success. Completion means that a learner, for example, views all of the materials and completes all assignments required to pass. Completion is binary, either a learner completes a course, or they do not. However, completion does not take into account if the learner uses anything they have learnt or if they learn anything at all. Success on the other hand depends entirely on the learner themselves and what they count as a success.

With journey mapping we could see this happen with some of our personas and it gave a better understanding how success can happen without completion. There are “invisible learners” who gain value from a MOOC without completing a course and are invisible if the only metric is completion rate and we saw this happen in practical terms with journey mapping.

I would like to leave the reader to think of a problem, especially if they are making a MOOC themselves, try to think what the learners could use their learning for and see if it can be tracked. This way you’ll have may be able to find the invisible successes that make a difference.

Huupponen, J. (2025). Designing a MOOC on sustainable campuses. Master’s thesis. Turku University of Applied Sciences.

Image source:

Craiyon 2025. Craiyon v4. [online image generator]. Referenced 8.5.2025 https://www.craiyon.com/