€182,000 funding for digital teaching

20.8.2020 | THD-Pressestelle

The Deggendorf Institute of Technology (DIT) has been intensively promoting the use of digital teaching for years before the corona pandemic. This commitment has now been rewarded with a grant of € 182,000 for DIT projects from the Virtual University of Bavaria (vhb). 

The digital courses offered via the SMART vhb platform gained in importance due to the cancellation of classroom teaching this summer semester. DIT already offers 28 vhb courses online, which were used by other universities of applied sciences, especially during the corona semester, and were applied in teaching. The notification of the vhb's support of € 182,000, which corresponds to 20% of the total funding of the latest SMART vhb funding round, will further expand DIT's digital teaching. Over the coming months, a total of ten courses will be developed and, from the 2021/2022 winter semester onwards, will be made available via the SMART vhb platform. The online courses range from the introduction to programming with Python, Java programming, programming concepts, computer science concepts, hardware design, foundations of informatics, AI applications and logic in artificial intelligence to engineering mechanics, dynamics and risk management. The development of these new SMART vhb projects is organised by Prof Dr Dr Heribert Popp, vhb representative of the unversity and project manager Dr-Ing Monica Ciolacu.

At DIT, the vhb representative, Prof Popp, has been substituting 50% of teaching in all his modules with digital teaching for 13 years now. In his digital course, he tested artificial intelligence (AI) methods by which digital teaching materials adapt to the level of knowledge of the students at the beginning of the course. Popp also uses an AI-based early warning system in his vhb courses, which sends a warning e-mail to students at risk. As a result, the failure rate could be almost halved.

The SMART vhb platform manages online learning units that can be flexibly integrated into the students' own teaching. These digital learning units start with the learning goals and are composed of different materials such as videos, text elements, self-tests or simulations.

Bild (DIT): vhb representative Prof Dr Dr Heribert Popp and project manager Dr-Ing Monica Ciolacu are looking forward to the new smart vhb projects.