Digital and Hybrid Teaching Projects from Three Faculties Receive Teaching Awards

Three projects on digital and hybrid teaching at the University of Freiburg received E-IDAs on 7 November 2023. The abbreviation stands for ‘Electronic – Instructional Development Award’. The teaching awards are worth 40,000 euros each and were awarded within the context of the University of Freiburg project ‘4D – 4 Dimensions of Digital and Didactic Development’.

E-IDAs are based on the university’s long-standing tradition of awarding IDAs for good teaching. The aim of the new awards is to promote teaching projects that are not just innovative but also have a lasting impact beyond the maximum project duration of 15 months and thus make a long-term contribution to the University of Freiburg’s digitalization strategy. ‘The projects make it clear how established teaching formats can be combined and enriched with digital elements in such a way that students and teachers profit from them’, says Dr. Christian Kny, project coordinator of 4D. The award winners are from three different faculties and were selected by the Permanent Senate Commission on Academic Affairs.

The award winners

One of the E-IDAs was awarded to Prof. Dr. Jennifer Andexer and Dr. Philipp Germer from the Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences for their project ‘KAPSEL – Sustainable Teaching and Learning Concept in Pharmacy’. The teaching and learning experiences of students are changing. The project addresses this with a special learning group scenario for beginning students in which classroom learning forms within learning groups are combined with e-learning elements to make optimal use of their respective advantages. Established online material, like the ‘kosmic’ platform and the interactive ILIAS learning modules developed in pharmaceutical chemistry, serve as a ‘jump-start’ in this connection. The students in the learning groups are introduced to different types of learning content over an extended time period via cross-semester learning support. This leads to the establishment of an analogue–digital learning and teaching cycle.

Dr. Janina Kirsch und Dr. Susanne Knies received the award for their project ‘Statistics Meets Biology’. The offering at the Faculty of Biology gives students the opportunity to acquire, practice, and apply knowledge and skills in statistics with an online self-learning module. The previously developed online course was conceived on the ILIAS-based learning platform ‘kosmic’ and is now being tested in a field study on a small group of students. Additional lessons are to be added in the future. In addition, the findings from the first test phase will be incorporated into future development in order to further improve the comprehensibility of the content and the usability of the course. The online course is to replace the previously classroom-based statistics module in the bachelor’s programme in biology.

The third E-IDA was awarded to Prof. Dr. Evelyn Lamy from the Medical Center – University of Freiburg. The transdisciplinary health concept of ‘Planetary Health’ considers the relationship between human health and global and local environmental changes. The project ‘E-Learning in the Area of “Planetary Health” and Climate Change in the Study of Medicine and for the “Sustainability Certificate” at the University of Freiburg’ is developing a specific e-learning course on this topic in collaboration with the digitalization team at the Academic Dean’s Office of the Faculty of Medicine. The course is designed for use both in the teaching of medicine and within the context of the Freiburg ‘Sustainability Certificate’ teaching programme, as well as on the BWMedEdCloud platform (accessible to all universities participating in the joint project). This will also enable a lasting and resource-saving curricular integration of core topics of ‘planetary health’ in the future that has potential for both innovation and transfer.

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