University of Mannheim Expands Digital Teaching
The InnoMA fund supports seven innovative projects at the University of Mannheim to promote digital university teaching. InnoMA is a project funded by “Innovation in der Hochschullehre”, and is aimed at continuously improving education at the University of Mannheim through new and digital forms of teaching. Seven individual and joint projects from different disciplines have been selected and will be funded for the duration of one year.
Digitalization also offers new prospects and great potential for university teaching. By funding innovative teaching offers as well as providing technical and didactic support, the InnoMA project is designed to provide modern teaching opportunities for students. The aim of the new digital teaching formats is to support the academic success of the students and to promote internationalization. Seven projects, which will start in the spring semester 2023, have been selected for the current funding period.
Analyzing texts will be the focus of several projects. By adding digital features, the “Leseliste 2.0” project offers a more interesting and appealing approach to the reading list which is a mandatory component in humanities. The “From Text to Data – from Data to Text“ project will help students of history and the humanities to learn how to digitize large sets of text data and how to edit and analyze them with digital analysis tools. Handling large sets of text data is also an important component of philosophic studies. “The Digitalization of Socratic Teaching” project adds audiovisual media to standard classes: Podcasts, videos, and quiz questions will contribute to a better understanding of abstract philosophic issues and make the learning process easier.
Other projects focus on communicative exchange. For example, the course “Graphic-Novel Based Case Studies on the Future of Work and Workplace Learning” is designed to promote collaborations between students from different universities on the topic “Future of Work”. “DigiDiskURsS” is a discussion platform that teaches students, by using real-life examples, how to analyze controversial topics such as organ trafficking from a critical point of view and to understand different positions.
Choosing a playful approach in the form of digital learning games, the project “GeR Gamified” aims to add new features to the accounting lecture “Externes Rechnungswesen”. An accounting simulator will therefore introduce students to the preparation of annual financial reports. In order to improve exam preparation for students of the master’s programs in Business Informatics, Mannheim Master in Data Science as well as Economic and Business Education, an individual recommendation feature will be added to the already established online platform ILIAS that will provide further and supplementary content.
In addition to initial projects that started with the beginning of InnoMA in August 2021, the first call for proposals with projects starting in the spring semester 2022 is already over. For the entire duration of InnoMA, a budget of EUR 1.1 million will be available and allocated to the individual projects.