Competence-oriented digital teaching, learning and testing: "Lessons learned" in the examING project

In the course of digitalization and the coronavirus pandemic, universities have developed a wide range of innovative digital tools and formats for studying and teaching. "This process has been particularly challenging for the engineering sciences," explains Vice President for Teaching and Learning and project manager Prof. Anja Geigenmüller:

For course content in the humanities and social sciences, for example, there were materials and scenarios quite early on that lecturers could adapt for purely online teaching. In contrast, there were hardly any concepts and ideas for (extensive) online teaching in engineering subjects, especially at Bachelor's level. Closing this gap and developing the integration of digital and face-to-face teaching as well as associated examination concepts was the main motivation for the application.

The researchers involved therefore first identified suitable examination scenarios, according to Dr. Claudia Haaßengier, Advisor of the Central Institute for Education (ZIB):

This also means that digital examinations are not just used when analog is not possible, but explicitly whenever a digital or hybrid form of examination is best suited for competence-oriented and student-centered testing.

For this reason, the experiences of students were also included in the project. Formats and methods that had already been successfully established were developed further, new approaches were tested and used in teaching and examination situations. "In addition to good ideas, this naturally also required appropriate technical equipment and infrastructure." For example, an e-examination lecture hall and several workshops with tools for digital fabrication were set up, which can be booked via the FabLab@TU-Ilmenau online platform.

The diversity of the twelve sub-projects developed in this way became apparent at the final conference. They range from new tools for programming training and the digitalization of air pressure or temperature measurements in the basic physics practical course to radar technology, which was made available as a digital twin in a virtual laboratory in the Electrical Engineering and Information Technology and Communications and Signal Processing degree courses.

"Supporting students in their learning and personal development"

As long as I've been involved in teaching here at TU Ilmenau, I've been interested in technology support for teaching and learning

says sub-project leader Gunther Kreuzberger about his experiences in the project.

I see us as teachers not as the ones at the front of the classroom, but as the ones who support our students in their learning and personal development. The key question should always be: What do I want to achieve in teaching and how can technology help me achieve this?

In the examING project, the lecturer was involved in two projects at once. The first project was about helping teachers to automatically assess and grade programs developed by students according to predefined criteria and rules using so-called autogrades. In this way, a tool was to be selected for programming training at TU Ilmenau, for which best practices were developed and tested.

The main aim was to be able to provide students with automatic, AI-generated feedback on their assignments - for different application scenarios, programming languages and, in line with our international orientation, in different languages.

The new tool is already being used in some engineering courses, in business informatics, in applied media and communication science and in computer science.

In a second project, Gunther Kreuzberger looked at how reflective learning and e-portfolio work, which are particularly widespread in the humanities, can also be digitally integrated into engineering and economics learning experiences:

In doing so, we have effectively opened a door to an entirely separate field.