How can a project team of students work together efficiently via the Internet when three of them are at the Gummersbach location and the other four at the Deutz location of the TH Köln? How can students in the lecture hall and their fellow students at home with their notebooks participate equally in the lecture and ask their questions? How can the university present its projects to interested citizens via online media and thus bring teaching content to the public?
Cooperation with the Leibnitz Institute in Tübingen
A research project at the Gummersbach campus of the TH Köln deals with these and many other questions of “hybrid teaching”. The project manager is the computer scientist Prof. Dr. Christian Kohls, internationally renowned expert in digital education. In the project “Effective factors and good practice in the design of hybrid learning spaces” (HybridLR) he works together with Prof. Dr. Ulrike Cress and Anne Thillosen from the Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media (IWM) in Tübingen. Another partner is the Center for Teaching Development (ZLE) of the TH Köln, represented by Birgit Szczyrba. The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding the project over three years with around one million euros, more than half going to the TH Köln.
At most German universities, lecturers and central units are working on optimizing digital and hybrid teaching, which combines face-to-face and online elements. The team around Prof. Kohls visits various universities on an “educational safari” and collects examples of successful concepts for digital-analog education. However, under the corona conditions, many meetings and discussions could only be carried out online. The current concepts include “maker garages” in which students work together partly in person and partly online. A “Hybrid Design Engineering Studio” offers a digitally improved environment for comprehensive collaboration between different locations. “Showcase galleries” invite the public to the campus and transform the university into a digital museum to involve citizens and experts.
Innovations-Labor hybrids
At the Gummersbach campus, Prof. Kohls has been running an innovation laboratory (the “ideas realm”) with a large number of analog and digital work equipment for several years. This includes digital whiteboards as well as idea cards or Lego blocks. Teams from Gummersbach companies have also used the space several times to develop new products or services.
According to Prof. Kohls, companies as well as teachers and students should benefit from the results of the HybridLR research project. The project results are made permanently available to all interested parties via the information portal e-teaching.org. At the beginning of the corona pandemic in March 2020, Prof. Kohls was particularly successful on this platform: more than 100,000 interested people downloaded his lecture “Good online teaching – practical tips for getting started”.
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