Digitalization of teaching, learning, and assessment in higher education has gained increasing attention in research in the recent years. While previous research investigated issues of effectiveness, course attendance, and course evaluation from a long-term perspective, the current COVID-19 pandemic forced higher education institutions to…

The present study looks at pre-service teachers' beliefs about multilingualism in school and to what extent these can be influenced. It is based on the pre- and post-test evaluation of a seminar concept promoting linguistically responsive teaching, which was tested with N = 27 pre-­service teachers in Germany during the course of one semester. The…

Developing students' systems thinking is an often-posed demand in education for sustainable development (ESD) and science literacy. Several studies have shown that systems thinking can be fostered in students of different education levels. Therefore, science teachers who are required to teach ESD-relevant topics should be proficient in systems…

The development of novel and useful ideas is a process that can be described in multiple steps, including information gathering, generating ideas and evaluating ideas. We evaluated a university course that was developed based on design thinking principles which employ similar steps. Our results show that the course was not effective in enhancing…

The close linkage between different institutions is widely recognized as a method of improving teacher education. This paper introduces an attempt to link university teacher training programmes with further teacher education thereby showing the benefits of the approach and factors influencing its success. To enable teachers and student teachers to…

Directionality has seldom been discussed with regard to the profiles of translation teachers. At German universities, the target language is usually the teacher's A language. By contrast, in countries whose languages are less widely spoken, it is more common for teachers to work into their B language along with their students. However, A-B…

The ECO European Project funded by the European Commission is dedicated to bringing MOOCs to a new dimension by taking advantage of the new possibilities offered by the Social Web (O'Reilly, 2005). This paper focuses on the intercreative aspects of MOOCs. It takes a look at the characteristics of the new ECO MOOCs to see if they are designed and…

Adopting an international approach to journalism pedagogy, this study reports on the findings of a Global Journalism Collaboration Project involving 267 undergraduate and postgraduate students from Germany, Italy, Kenya, Uganda, Romania, Colombia, and Australia. Over 6 weeks in 2019, students collaborated to produce multimedia news stories on…

Validity is an important issue when measuring teaching quality using student evaluations. This study examined the effects of psychology students' subjective clarity about study contents and their prior interest in the subject as variables possibly biasing the evaluations of psychology courses. German students (N = 292) evaluated lectures and…

Ongoing technological progress in measurement systems triggered the development of an in­novative, hands-on teaching program to help students toward a fuller understanding of recent changes in the field. This paper presents a lab project that links theoretical principles with the practical issues of signal conditioning systems. This is…

Although the decade for Education for Sustainable Development has been well promoted in Germany it still finds itself in a rather marginal position, both in the formal and in the informal educational sector. This is at least partly due to the status it is given in the political debate that leads to different expectations by different actors who…

E-learning has made course evaluation easier in many ways, as a multitude of learner data can be collected and related to student performance. At the same time, open learning environments can be a difficult field for evaluation, with a large variance in participants' knowledge level, learner behaviour, and commitment. In this study the…

Purpose: In the process of the implementation of the eBologna program and the recent change of the university system, curricula at German universities have been redesigned; courses have been condensed and learning content has been re-structured into modules, each of which requires an evaluation. Simultaneously, skills required for working in…

This paper investigates how legal cannabis access affects student performance. Identification comes from an exceptional policy introduced in the city of Maastricht which discriminated legal access based on individuals' nationality. We apply a difference-in-difference approach using administrative panel data on over 54,000 course grades of local…

This article investigates the participating students' evaluation of a teacher training seminar about heterogeneity in the classroom at Bielefeld University, Germany. The evaluation made use of a short questionnaire and an end-of-term test of the students' knowledge on the subject matter. The questionnaire is tested for objectivity, reliability,…