Transformation of a traditional face-to-face engineering study program into a digital online program - A case study of global production engineering

Abstract

The need for Digital Education (DE) in higher education has been growing for the past years, as the landscape of education became more diverse and global. It has become apparent with the COVID-19 pandemic that, in terms of width, DE had been mostly neglected so far. In the past year, the master program Global Production Engineering (GPE) at Technische Universität Berlin has been enhanced by a complete digital track, called GPE-Digital. In order to design this online study program a student survey was conducted and lecturers have been interviewed. The results were analysed and requirements for both lecturers and students were identified. Chances and challenges have been identified and a “tool box” for teaching and learning was developed. It contains a multimedia studio, a learning platform, a cloud platform et cetera. Lecturers are supported to develop and adapt their lecture-concepts and to choose the tools needed, which led to a variance of teaching-concepts. In this paper, after presenting the findings of both the interviews and the survey, the “tool box” is presented and its various possibilities for implementation are shown by the example of four different courses offered at GPE-Digital. These examples contain both synchronous and asynchronous teaching and different approaches of preparing joint sessions and lectures. Finally, based on the courses the benefits and challenges are discussed and rough approaches for exploiting the benefits and tackling the challenges are given.