What motivated you to want to realize a teaching innovation?

We are both concerned with the question of how to get non-computer scientists interested in digitalization. The teaching innovation professorship gives us the freedom to work intensively on this topic and to try out new didactic concepts for teaching future skills, i.e. skills for an increasingly digitalized working world. We are delighted to have the opportunity to further improve the courses offered by the Regensburg School of Digital Sciences (RSDS) for students from all faculties.

RSDS website: https://rsds.oth-regensburg.de/

Prof. Dr. Plach, Prof. Dr. Heckner, what do you do in your innovation professorship?

As part of the teaching innovation professorship, we want to further expand the Regensburg School of Digital Sciences at OTH Regensburg. The aim of the RSDS is to anchor digitalization as an interdisciplinary topic in all degree courses at OTH Regensburg. In addition, through the participation of students from the individual faculties of OTH Regensburg, a procedural model for surveying the needs for digitalization content in teaching is being developed and tested in practice. We want to present the findings on students' needs to various faculty committees. We hope that this will provide an impetus to design and implement new interdisciplinary courses related to digitalization. In addition, the existing additional study program Digital Skills at RSDS will be further developed and made permanent. The aim is to make it available to a larger group of participants and expand it to include new topics such as artificial intelligence. This topic has obviously become increasingly important in recent months.

Digital Skills website: https://rsds.oth-regensburg.de/digital-skills

Why is it so important? to support students from all disciplines with interdisciplinary courses in the field of digitalization?

Due to current megatrends such as connectivity, sustainability and urbanization (Zukunftsinstitut, 2023 - https://www.zukunftsinstitut.de/artikel/die-megatrend-map/), students will be confronted with different requirements when they enter the world of work than was the case in previous decades. These trends lead to challenges that can often only be solved through interdisciplinary cooperation. We want to prepare our students for this situation by enabling them to work together in interdisciplinary courses during their studies. We receive feedback from students that working groups with students from other disciplines and the different, multi-perspective approaches are a great enrichment for them during their studies.

How could students, other lecturers and researchers (at OTH) benefit from your projects?

If everything goes as planned, then students from all faculties will benefit from an expanded range of courses in the field of digitalization tailored to their needs, as well as from the innovations in relation to the additional Digital Skills course.

The additional Digital Skills course prepares students for the digitalized working world of the future. Both technological skills and non-technical future skills, such as agile project management, user experience and digital ethics, are taught. Due to the high purchase price of the learning box currently used in the first module, the additional Digital Skills course is currently limited to 20 students per semester. In order to enable more interested students to participate and to counteract obsolescence of the hardware contained in the box, a version of the supplementary course without a learning box is to be established. In addition, the content of the supplementary course is to be further developed as part of the teaching innovation professorship, based on the results of the needs survey. Based on student feedback, existing content is to be updated and supplemented with additional relevant topics. For example, a teaching unit on ChatGPT is planned.

Our teaching innovation professorship aims to gain generalizable insights for university practice. What are the needs of students in the area of teaching future skills and how can these be considered and taken into account didactically? Other teachers and researchers can benefit from the results of the student needs survey and our learnings from university practice. At least two scientific publications are planned in the context of the teaching innovation professorship. For example, at the QUADIS symposium Brückenschlag: Lernprozesse in analogue, hybriden und digitalen Formaten in October 2023, we presented our contribution entitled "Entwicklung und Durchführung eines Vorgehensmodells zur Erhebung des Bedarfs an Digitalisierungsinhalte in der Lehre aus Sicht der Studierenden".

Abstract QUADIS Symposium

The teaching offer is to be expanded on the basis of a qualitative and quantitative survey. What exactly is your approach?

This video shows the process model we developed to survey the need for digitalization content in teaching from the students' perspective, as well as the initial results.