The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) is funding the Student Crowd Research interdisciplinary research project (SCoRe) in the context of digital higher education with a total of 3.24 million euros over three and a half years. The universities of Bremen, Kiel, and Hamburg, the Macromedia University of Applied Sciences, and the company Ghostthinker are involved.

Coordination by the Virtual Academy of Sustainability at the University of Bremen

The aim is to investigate how a digital educational space must be designed using interactive video functions in order to encourage students to engage in research on sustainability. Professor Georg Müller-Christ and the team from the Virtual Academy of Sustainability in the Faculty of Business Studies and Economics at the University of Bremen are coordinating the joint project SCoRe. For years, this has supported German-speaking higher education institutions in integrating sustainability into their curricula by means of video-based courses.

Research-Based Learning for Sustainable Education

The innovative use of videos both as learning tools and as works produced by students themselves will also be the focus of the new research project. The concrete teaching content refers to the Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) UN Global Action Programme. It is an educational approach that enables people to think and act in a sustainable and responsible way. “Video technologies are becoming used more passively in teaching. We want to explore the opportunities for exchange and collaboration offered by digital instruments. These are becoming ever more important when it comes to conveying core competencies such as critical and systematic thinking and organizational ability. In the same way, the individual findings of the learners will be combined to form a stream of research on sustainability that enables students working together to further develop the content of the research to do so in a purely digital environment,” explains Müller-Christ. As conceivable examples, he cites the use of 360-degree video techniques and virtual reality, which enable connections to be visualized differently.

Tapping into the Potential of Digitization for the German Educational Landscape

Over the next three and a half years, the SCoRe partners will work with the design-based research approach. In several phases of exploration, design, and evaluation that continually build upon one another, the scientists will develop prototypes for packages with different digital functions. These will then be tested and evaluated in courses. In this way, both goals are pursued on the one hand to provide concrete practical educational benefits and, on the other hand, to gain insights and practical knowledge for the German higher education landscape and other areas of education. The progress made by SCoRe will be published on a homepage maintained by the partners, for instance.

Additional Information:

www.uni-bremen.de/nm/forschung/forschungsprojekte/ (German only)

www.uni-bremen.de

Contact:

Dr. Jonas Joachims
Virtual Academy of Sustainability
University of Bremen
Tel.: +49 421 218-66791
E-mail: joachimsprotect me ?!uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de

Professor Georg Müller-Christ
Department of Sustainable Management
University of Bremen
Tel.: +49 421 218-66780
E-mail: gmcprotect me ?!uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de