University Teaching 2025
Shaping digital transformation in teaching
Digitisation and Artificial Intelligence are are not only changing the world of work and society, they have also brought immense dynamism to the world of higher education. As part of its strategic development focus “University Teaching 2025”, the FHNW has been testing, evaluating and implementing digitally supported teaching and learning formats since 2018.
The staff of the FHNW are developing teaching in a practical, collaborative and reflective manner, such that the students and continuing education participants at the FHNW experience state-of-the-art studies and are equipped for the rapidly changing working worlds of tomorrow.
For us, designing university teaching in a digital context means combining digital and analogue content and formats in a way that is meaningful, flexible and, above all, conducive to learning. It means using new technologies critically and consciously as an opportunity for creative, inclusive and sustainable learning and working. The FHNW prepares its students for a world of work in which much is still unknown. More than ever, digital skills and the training of the four Cs are needed to act in a self-determined and responsible manner in the digital future:
Communication – Collaboration – Creativity – Critical Thinking
The FHNW views the transformation of higher education in the digital context as a broad, interdisciplinary, co-creative and participatory process: exploring and reflecting together, learning from each other, entering into dialogue. Admitting controversies and, last but not least, making existing potentials and solutions visible and usable in the long term.
“With its many passionate experts, the FHNW offers an immense wealth of ideas and initiatives. The DigitalSkills@FHNW sub-project with the ImpulsWerkstatt brings this to light and allows many colleagues to share in it – a win for all those involved and students of the FHNW!”
“In our teaching fund project, we are working on a virtual physics laboratory where students can carry out physical experiments. There, they can disregard the laws of physics and find out, safely and cost-effectively, what happens if the experiments fail. We are convinced that virtual reality will be of the utmost importance in education in the coming decade.”
“It was a mega-exciting experience. We learned a lot about ourselves and about what is important when communicating and presenting knowledge. We are dealing with exciting topics, with something we did not know before, and we have learned a lot about sustainability.”
“From a computer science perspective, knowledge preservation in connection with the ‘University Teaching 2025’ project means networking people who carry knowledge and providing platforms that enable these people to use this knowledge – even after the project has ended.”
In ten cross-FHNW, interdisciplinary and participatory sub-projects, employees of the FHNW are developing solutions for learning and teaching in a digital context. As the diagram shows, five of them focus on innovation, three on knowledge and two on infrastructure and legal frameworks.