The course ELSS830 links strategic leadership to the competence and capacity building in an organisation. The course includes three lecturers who all cover the topic from very different viewpoints.

The first lecturer is Dr Tapio Lahtero. He works as the superintendent of education in a major Finnish municipality. Dr Lahtero argues that the theories and practice should always go hand in hand. Reality in education, however, is often far from the school book examples. In his lectures Dr Lahtero uses his own workplace, the city of Vantaa, as an example of one practical implementation of the theories. In his lectures Dr Lahtero also covers and introduces some basic theories connected to the theme.
Please note that lectures 3 to 5 in Session 2 by Dr Lahtero are optional as they are very practical and heavily basic education specific. These lectures serve as a practical example on how to lead the curriculum development process in the education sector. Even though the context of the lectures is Finnish basic education, many ideas are applicable to other cultures and contexts.

In lectures 3 and 4 of Session 3 Dr David Nkengbeza talks about organisations as learning communities. Dr Nkengbeza looks at competence and capacity building through learning organisations also from the viewpoint of developing countries and societies.

The third lecturer in this course is Abdirizak Mohamed. Mr Mohamed returns to the theories and argues how competence and capacity building in an organisation is fundamentally simply knowledge transfer, creation and management in different forms.

The course consists of four different learning sessions. A session usually covers a focused topic of the main themes of the courses as determined by the lecturer. The sessions are different: some emphasize lectures and readings, others might be recordings on student discussions for you to reflect on.

There will be individual work and assignments and personal reflective reporting. Please, follow carefully the instructions at the beginning of each session and lecture.