Teaching for the future

Games in sports classes, digitization in law, the basics of chemistry and machine learning as professional skills qualifications: The University of Freiburg has given its teaching prize of 70,000 euros, the Instructional Development Award (IDA), to each of four projects. The projects run for a maximum of 18 months and begin on 1 October 2019. In this time, the money is available to the prizewinners to use for their projects. For instance they can use it to engage someone else to take over their classes or to hire research assistants or temporary staff.

Professor Dr. Albert Gollhofer and Dr. Flavio Bessi (Institute of Sport and Sports Science): DoppelfOERderung: Lernen durch Lehren an und mit Geräten (twofold learning by teaching with equipment)

Physical education teachers often use games in their lessons to get pupils moving. There are also game elements as part of university studies and practical assessments. Sports students are now going to try out “gamification” - including theoretical content - using a core sport, gymnastics, as an example, thereby better integrating practical and theoretical sports content. They will also develop digital learning content, which will then be freely available to other students, articled clerks and sports teachers. This enables students to take on the role of teachers during their training and to acquire both technical and media skills.

Professor Dr. Boris P. Paal (Institut für Medien- und Informationsrecht): Law and Digitization - Coding for lawyers

Digitalization is increasingly influencing both jurisprudence and legal practice. On the one hand, new forms of legal services are emerging which primarily carry out standardizable tasks automatically. On the other hand, jurisprudence has to keep up with digital change so as to be able to formulate normative rules for new technologies. That means that at the start of their training, law students need to learn, in a practical and comprehensive way, how digital change, automating software and artificial intelligence will affect their future profession. At the same time, they can develop their own ideas for startups, working with students from other faculties, especially computer science.

Professor Dr. Birgit Esser, Prof. Dr. Eckhard Bartsch and Dr. Janina Kirsch (Institute of Organic Chemistry, Institute of Physical Chemistry and Faculty of Biology): Chemistry bootcamp

Organic chemistry is at the heart of all life sciences and an important foundation stone - not only for the study of chemistry, but also for the study of biology, molecular medicine and pharmaceutical sciences. Teachers from various faculties and departments have developed exercises to enable students in the introductory phase to reactivate and practice their basic organic chemistry skills and the mathematics required in the field of physical chemistry. All courses are available to all students via the ILIAS platform, and can be credited to other degree programs.

Professor Dr. Thorsten Schmidt, Assistant Professor Dr. Philipp Harms and Prof. Dr. Frank Hutter (Institute of Mathematics and Informatics Institute): Machine learning and artificial intelligence in Freiburg

Machine learning has developed rapidly in recent years and is entering more and more new areas - such as image and speech recognition, robotics and medicine. As a result, it is increasingly becoming a key qualification in university studies, and is in great demand among students. The aim of this project is to develop a cross-disciplinary teaching concept for machine learning that meets the high demand for it as well as a variety of different objectives. To this end, a modular framework of various teaching units will be designed; it will be available digitally and so can be integrated into existing teaching formats in many subjects.

The University of Freiburg has published a collection of articles about early IDA projects:
University of Freiburg (ed.): Kreativ, Innovativ, Motivierend – Lehrkonzepte in der Praxis. Der Instructional Development Award (IDA) der Universität Freiburg. Bielefeld 2016.