Funding for Virtual Teaching and Learning
The Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia supports seven virtual teaching and learning projects with participation from RWTH.
In order to provide a further boost to virtual teaching and learning at higher education institutions in North Rhine-Westphalia, the NRW Ministry of Culture and Science and Digitale Hochschule NRW (DH.NRW) are again providing funding for 18 digital teaching and learning concepts. The involved universities will receive a total of about 10 million euros from the OERContent.nrw funding line.
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. The projects will be launched starting April 2022.
RWTH was involved in 16 out of 58 submitted proposals: RWTH submitted six proposals as a project-leading institution and was is involved in ten further proposals as a consortium partner.
The following three projects led by RWTH were approved for funding:
- FAIBLE: Didactics of Computer Science in Building Blocks for Teaching – RWTH's Learning Technologies Research Group in collaboration with the universities of Bonn, Münster, Paderborn, and Duisburg-Essen
- ANDI (Digital Anatomy), a learning app for medical students and professionals –RWTH Institute of Neuroanatomy in collaboration with the universities of Cologne and Bonn
- BioLabSim Biological Lab Simulations – RWTH Institute of Applied Microbiology in collaboration with the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences (WH), Rhine-Waal University of Applied Science, and RWTH Center for Learning and Teaching Services CLS
RWTH will be involved in the following four approved projects as a consortium partner:
- ALFDyn – Adaptive Learning Environment for the Subject of Dynamics as an OER, led by TU Dortmund University
- Alepa, led by Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts
- DiaMint, led by the Westphalian University of Applied Sciences (WH)
- Operations Research (OR) for Sustainability – Energy, Mobility, Industry, led by the University of Duisburg-Essen
OERContent.nrw is the largest funding source in Germany for open educational resources. Both teachers and students can benefit from the online course offerings, as they will be made freely available on the ORCA.nrw website. The website offers instructors the opportunity to share free educational resources with each other. Students are encouraged to use these high-quality online resources for self-study purposes.