2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

With more than 33,000 students primarily in engineering and architecture, mathematics and natural sciences, the university (name) is one of the largest technical universities in Germany. The teaching staff comprises only about 350 full-time professors, about 30 junior professors, few full-time and part-time lecturers, but nearly 2,700 scientific research and teaching assistants.

This leads to challenges in its engineering education – particularly in the highly frequented STEM-courses during the freshman year. Current challenges for teaching and learning are caused by recent structural and curricular changes of the undergraduate and graduate programs. This contradicts with partly traditional learning environments, in particular big classes with 1,000 or more students in introductory STEM-lectures. Therefore, the quality of teaching with large student numbers is one of the top priorities of the university (name). An university-wide study reform program aims to improve study conditions and to foster the quality of teaching and learning.

Therefore, a series of teaching projects focussing on digital teaching is currently funded at our university in the framework of a special project line. Digitalization not only drives Industry 4.0, but is also excessively integrated within educational processes. The new technological opportunities allow individuals to study more flexible, realise different multifaceted content for complex topics and to provide and get individual feedback on the learning process.

This paper provides information, progress and first results on different teaching projects, which are integrated within different courses at our university.

In this paper we present several projects of an initiative for innovation and improvement in teaching at our university. This initiative is financed by the German Higher Education Pact 2020. With these and other projects, innovation is brought specifically to courses and areas, where improved teaching methods are desired, for example to reduce the failure rates or lack of motivation of the students, in large courses and graduation programs with high failure rates.
First, a selection of the teaching projects, their approaches and first results on these projects is presented. Afterwards commonalities and differences are being discussed with an outlook on subsequent steps. This publication is based on research funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the project number 01PL 17024.