University of Mannheim experts receive prestigious fellowship

Prof. Dr. Hiram Kümper (Chair of Late Medieval and Early Modern History) and Viktor Boecking (University Library Mannheim) will receive a fellowship from the Stifterverband Baden-Württemberg amounting to around 40,000 euros for a digital teaching project.

In the project “Cultural heritage hands-on: Immersive learning in three-dimensional spaces”, Kümper and Boecking want to create virtual content through which distant, difficult or inaccessible spaces are to be opened up for teaching practice. In the project, the two historians are moving the lecture hall into practice and are dealing, among other things, with inaccessible museum storage and archive rooms, which are made accessible for discovery and research by scientists and students in the first place with the help of virtual and augmented reality. The use of virtual reality glasses in the university library’s innovative teaching and learning room ExpLAB can create completely new seminar concepts for various disciplines.

The project is scheduled to run for ten months and is intended to lay the foundation for similar courses.

With the fellowships for “teaching innovation and support offers in digital university teaching”, the Stifterverband wants to encourage the further development of digital university teaching beyond the pandemic. A total of 14 tandems from Baden-Württemberg universities, which have further developed exemplary teaching concepts and support offers for digital university teaching, are supported by the state.