The Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia is funding the joint project "Digital Innovation and Sustainable Development" by Prof. Mona Mensmann, Prof. Tobias Brandt (WWU Münster) and Prof. Milad Mirbabaie (University of Paderborn) over the next two years.
The project "Digital Innovation and Sustainable Development" aims to further anchor the topics of sustainability, digitalisation and innovation in business degree programmes and to provide corresponding teaching materials for other disciplines.
In the funding line "OERContent.nrw" (Open Education Resources), the North Rhine-Westphalian state government supports cross-university digital teaching with open educational resources. According to Science Minister Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen, the aim is to continuously support the development of digital teaching and learning materials as a state. "Both teachers and students benefit from the e-learning offerings, as they are freely accessible after the projects are completed," said Pfeiffer-Poensgen.
In terms of content, the students, as part of teaching, work on case studies, which in particular demonstrate the innovative power of digital technologies to tackle the major challenges of our time, for example poverty, climate change and gender justice. These so-called "teaching cases" will be based on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
The resulting teaching materials will be freely accessible and available in various formats on the state portal for studies and teaching ORCA.nrw (Open Resources Campus NRW), for example as a set of slides, in the form of video clips, or as materials for independent elaboration. Teachers are thus enabled to adapt the content to different target groups (Bachelor's/Master's) and formats (small groups/large events). At the same time, teachers can access curricula and examination drafts that are suitable for target groups and formats. Beyond use in university courses, the content can be further developed in the long term into an open Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).