liveSciences³ Joint Digital Learning Material
Diversifying learning and creating international opportunities was part of the liveSciences³ ambitious goals.
First, involving teaching staff from international partner universities enables integrating a transnational perspective into the curricula.
Second, using digital learning material enables students to flexibilize their international studies.
Furthermore, the creation and design of digital learning material is very time-consuming. So why not collaborate with other lecturers to create joint digital learning material?
To better meet students' needs and offer more flexible and international learning opportunities, liveSciences³ aimed to provide customized, digital learning material to support virtual and blended formats.
The development and implementation of time- and location-independent shared digital teaching and learning materials created opportunities for intensifying collaboration and student exchange where asynchronous semester times made physical mobility difficult (e.g., in the case of Costa Rica and Chile).
Usually, lecturers create their individual teaching material like slides, literature, and videos. Creating teaching material with other lecturers from partner universities enriched the content and quality. That allowed us to add further life science expertise across disciplines, site-specific knowledge and examples, plus new perspectives.
Furthermore, lecturers could save resources (e.g. video equipment) and time when collaborating with (international) colleagues for the production of digital learning material. In addition, we supported lecturers to publish their material as Open Educational Resources (OER). Many liveSciences³ educational resources were published as OER at the OER Portal of Lower Saxony twillo. Most importantly, new ideas emerged during the collaborations; starting from creating joint learning material, we developed ideas for joint courses and established them across the Life Science network.
Finally, students across the Life Sciences network had the chance to learn about tropical forests in Costa Rica or primal forests in Bosnia and Herzegovina from and with international lecturers from partner universities. Plus, the use of online learning material, including videos and self-learning courses, enabled students to flexibilize their (international) studies.
During our project, we found intersections in the topics taught at the different partner universities. One common topic was the usage of drones for environmental monitoring in forest science. So the idea came up to create a joint online course about that, which can be used as preparation for block courses or field days. The course is still in progress and will be made available on OpenILIAS.
Within the liveSciences³ project, we created many joint videos. The ideas and content came from one of our partner universities; the video editing and the whole production, including coordination, came from the University of Göttingen, especially from the SUB video team.
Here on the website of the forestry faculty, you can find many examples of such joint videos.
As part of the liveSciences³ project, a wiki was created together with lecturers from the life sciences, in which information on university-internal and publicly accessible statistics courses, learning and teaching materials, data sets and helpful resources on statistics in R can be collected, exchanged and further developed. Find out more under R & Statistics Wiki.
- Share resources (e.g. video equipment, software);
- Learn from each other and add expertise and quality;
- Increase the outreach of your learning material;
- Combine materials and diversify learning.
Recommendations
- Consider that collaboration requires time and commitment;
- Provide learning material in different languages (e.g. English, plus local language) to enhance use and benefits;
- Create new material, which can be published as OER & publish created material as OER.
Contact:
Prof. Dr. Hiltraud Casper-Hehne
Head of project
Dr. Anne Sennhenn
Project Coordinator
Von-Siebold-Straße 2
Room 1.101
37075 Göttingen
E-Mail: anne.sennhenn@zvw.uni-goettingen.de
Telefon: +49 (0)551 39 21294
For general questions:
Email: livesciences3@uni-goettingen.de
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