Success for RWTH’s Online Teaching Strategy

03/06/2020

The NRW Ministry of Culture and Science and Digitale Hochschule NRW provide funding for five RWTH remote learning projects.

  

During the coronavirus crisis, the universities in North Rhine-Westphalia have quickly implemented what has been termed the "digital summer semester," providing students with a comprehensive program of online course offerings. Financial support is being provided, among others, by the Ministry of Culture and Science in cooperation with Digitale Hochschule NRW, a collaborative venture of 42 universities in NRW.

18 concepts for digital teaching and learning are now receiving funding within the OERContent.nrw funding line, receiving 10.5 million euros in total over two years. OER stands for Open Education Resources – freely accessible e-learning formats such as online courses, explanatory videos, podcasts, or virtual labs. Funded are joint projects between at least three universities, as the goal of the initiative is to promote inter-university collaboration. RWTH is involved in the following five projects, in three of them as project-leading institution:

  • DecisionMaster 2020 – Training Tool for Clinical Decision Making for the Implementation of the National Catalogue of Learning Objectives in Medicine (NKLM) (Professor Martin Georg Häusler, Martin Lemos)
  • Digital Learning Environment – Structural Analysis – as a Holistic Concept (Professor Sven Klinkel, Professor Volker Rexing)
  • Hydro OER – Hydrology Repository (Professor Heribert Nacken, Dr. Malte Persike)
  • Digital Histo Atlas NRW (Professor Thomas Pufe, Professor Cordian Beyer)
  • OER4EE – Technologies for the Energy Transition (Professor Dirk Uwe Sauer)

Among the participating universities, RWTH Aachen University was granted the largest number of projects with project leader status. According to Professor Aloys Krieg, Vice Rector for Teaching, this success highlights the great acceptance of free online formats at the University: "This shows that we have been driving forward the digitalization of teaching and learning for some time. The coronavirus crisis has demonstrated how important it is to develop digital course offerings for securing student success".