Faculty of Mechanical Engineering leads innovative projects in the OERContent.nrw funding program

The aim of the OERContent.nrw funding program is to develop e-learning resources that all teachers and students at universities in NRW, but also outside NRW, can use and adapt free of charge. The educational offerings will therefore be uploaded to the "Landesportal Open Resources Campus NRW (ORCA.nrw)" as Open Educational Resources (OER), i.e. as freely accessible educational resources, once development is complete. Two projects under the project management of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering were successful in this third round of calls for proposals and will be implemented across universities within the next two years. 

Interactive learning videos

In the "Digital Technical Mechanics" (DTM) project, the scientists involved are developing innovative learning videos and application-oriented problems for the basic subject of mechanics in order to promote the acquisition of contemporary and necessary skills. The interactive learning videos provide direct feedback to the students: they make decisions that influence which content is displayed to them next. The problems are structured in a modular way so that the great diversity in terms of students, but also the framework conditions at the different locations of the consortium can be taken into account. Gamification" approaches are used to additionally increase the motivation of the learners through playful elements. A special feature of the project is the interdisciplinary cooperation of engineering institutions (for the technical perspective) with the chair of Engineering Didactics (Prof. Dr. Tobias Haertel) of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering for the didactic expertise.

Project management: Dr.-Ing. Thorsten Bartel  (Institute of Mechanics, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering)
Other universities involved:  Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences, Ruhr University Bochum, University of Paderborn, University of Duisburg-Essen, Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, Westphalian University of Applied Sciences, Bergische Universität Wuppertal.

Game-based learning

In the project "Game-based Learning in structured self-study with EduCaching" (GamBLe EduCache), three universities in the Ruhr region also use the "gamification" approach, based on geocaching, to motivate students from different disciplines to learn continuously in a playful way. In addition, they are to reflect on their own learning process. In the learning game, students are given location coordinates in the Ruhr region that are thematically related to the learning content and visit them. In teams, learning content is then repeated, specialist questions are answered or analyses are carried out at the location. In addition, students in higher semesters will develop their own caches.

Project management: Dr.-Ing. Lukas Wojarski (Chair of Materials Technology, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering)
Other universities involved:  Ruhr University Bochum, University of Duisburg-Essen

In the first two rounds of calls for proposals for OERContent.nrw 2020 and 2021, TU Dortmund University of Applied Sciences and Arts has already been involved in eight successful projects.