Faculty 3: Civil Engineering

 

Faculty-Wide Initiative to Promote Open Education Resources – OER

The OER initiative of Faculty 3 started during the 1st funding phase of the digitalization strategy in 2016. Within the faculty, videos with English subtitles, but without audio explanations were created on various civil engineering topics.

 

In the current funding phase, a portion of the funding is used to create 360-degree videos to further showcase specific content.

Within Faculty 3, LFI provides support regarding the design, creation, and integration of the videos both on the existing YouTube channel and in specific VR scenarios.

 

 

MyScore Project at the Faculty of Civil Engineering

As part of the MyScore project, an open source software for avatar-based teaching and learning was developed at the Faculty of Engineering Hydrology. The software enables students and lecturers to collaborate and interact almost freely, regardless of their real location, using 3D VR scenarios.

Students and lecturers are represented by avatars and can communicate with each other in the different VR scenarios, while a 360-degree surround and audio function guarantees a realistic perception. The software has already been used several times to enable students from different fields of study to work on joint projects independent of location (e.g. collaboration between engineers from RWTH Aachen University and prospective lawyers from Bucerius Law School in Hamburg).

The existing 3D scenarios range from simple conference rooms for communication to role-play scenarios for developing communication skills and virtualized laboratory rooms. The scenarios are available to users as open educational resources.