Jonathan Seim, Marco Wähner and Anna-Lotta Dechow have jointly published a concept for digital participation for student co-design of learning and teaching content in university courses. The concept (see below for more information) is aimed at interested lecturers who would like to involve students in the design of seminars (e.g. on the topics of individual sessions) via an online platform. In addition to general aspects of online participation, opportunities and challenges, the concept provides guidelines for practical implementation. HHU lecturers can use the participation platform dialog@hhu, which is based on the open source platform “Adhocracy”.
The concept was developed at the Düsseldorf Institute for Internet and Democracy (DIID), which is also in charge of the participation platform. However, the concept should also be interesting for lecturers who do not work at the HHU, as the guide is also transferable to other discussion platforms and may inspire student online participation. For more info, see the DIID homepage at https://diid.hhu.de/youniversity/.
YOUniversity is also a little project of the heart. The idea was developed by Tobias Escher and Marco Wähner during a seminar in 2015. Thanks to funding from the HHU’s eLearning Förderfonds (elff), an initial concept was created and the project was tested in practice – at that time still with a rudimentary technical infrastructure. in 2017, the German Initiative for Network Information (DINI) awarded YOUniversity the prize “Co-designing Teaching and Learning – Studying in the Digital Age”. In the meantime, the project has been used in various seminars at HHU to enable students to help shape seminar content. It is good to see that the project has been consolidated by new supporters at the DIID.
Project description:
The goal of YOUniversity projects is the participation of students in seminar planning through the cooperative development of seminar content using an online platform. In one possible variant, students can propose topics for seminar sessions, discuss them and vote on them. The project contributes to improving the quality of studies, insofar as the participatory involvement of students has a positive effect on their motivation to deal with seminar content independently and to actively participate in the seminar. In addition, the participatory involvement of students promotes the acquisition of digital and participatory skills.
To implement YOUniversity, the DIID uses the in-house online participation platform dialog@hhu. The modular and intuitive structure of the platform ensures the smooth and quick creation and implementation of participation processes.
DIID provides interested lecturers with a package of supporting materials as well as access to the online platform. The package primarily contains a guide, which includes an explanation of the basic objectives, an outline of essential design decisions, a presentation of the participation platform, recommendations for action and two best-practice examples. Two separate click instructions also support the technical implementation of the best practice examples on the online platform. Finally, two presentations are provided, one to introduce the netiquette and one to help with the registration process.