Symposium Scientist in Residence 2017/18 Digitalisation and the Future of Higher Education and Work

Decembre 2017, 5th & 6th in R12 S00 H12 (Glaspavillon)

Program

Prof. Dr. Michael Kerres From E-Learning to the digital transformation of higher education

In the past years, impressive improvements have been made to use digital technology for teaching and learning. E-Learning has become a major force for educational reform in higher education worldwide. But digital technology has even broader implications if we look at the complete student lifecycle in universites. The presentation will demonstrate the impact of digital technology on all these aspects supporting student learning in higher education institutions. It will emphasize on the changing role of teachers in this future scenario and the challenges universities are faced with when developing and implementing these scenarios. 

Prof. Dr. Nicole Krämer Is learning in digitalized environments better? Psychological aspects of new technology in higher education

New technologies promise to revolutionize education by (massive open) online courses, YouTube tutorials, and automatic tutors such as pedagogical agents and robots. It seems, however, to be naive to expect that the employment of technology alone will lead to higher learner  motivation and more efficient learning. From a psychological  perspective, the talk will focus on factors that influence whether new  technology indeed increases learning success.

Prof. Dr. Gregor Engels Customized learning with a digital twin

Everyone learns in different ways and in different timeframes. Everyone has a different background, different experiences, different abilities. Traditional teaching styles don’t cope with this adequately. Digital techniques allow to individualize learning processes. The underlying core are digital twins, which act as life-long repositories of characteristics of a learning individual. The talk discusses challenges and risks of using digital twins in learning environments.

Prof. Dr. Ute Klammer Work 4.0 - The Impact of Digitalisation on the Working World and Implications for Learning and Education in Structural Change

Digitalisation will not only lead to the disappearance of jobs, the creation of new jobs and changing skill requirements in many existing jobs. It also leads to fundamental challenges for existing qualification systems as well as labour law and labour relations. New digital technologies thoroughly change the content and organisation of work. They may require new skills concerning the self-managed of workers and working time systems. The consequences, however, may differ for each worker. Accordingly, economic and policy conclusions as well as adaptions in the educational system cannot be derived for the labour market as a whole. 

But workers’ qualifications need not only to be adapted to changing occupational tasks. Work intensification and increasing communication flows have to be addressed as well. Furthermore, adequate human resources policies can foster the proper use of new flexible work arrangements. In a social-scientific perspective there is no deterministic relationship between technology and work but the development of work has to be regarded as a strategic and political design project. 

The presentation therefore reflects the consequences and necessary adaptions of the educational system, in particular higher education. It starts from sketching recent and projected developments in the world of work, referring in particular to the "White Paper Work 4.0"  (Weißbuch Arbeiten 4.0) published in 2016 by the German Ministry of Labour (BMAS), to which the presenter has contributed in an expert counselling group. The presentation then turns to the consequences for higher education, in particular the question, how both contents and structures of higher education have to be developed and adapted to cope with the new requirements of the working world and to enable lifelong learning.

Prof. Dr. Tobias Hoßfeld Enterprise Crowdsourcing - Application of Crowdsourcing for Enterprise Use Cases and Influence on Higher Education

Crowdsourcing is an emerging paradigm and business model in the Internet which can dramatically change the future of work and work organization in the online world. In contrast to outsourcing, where a job is performed by a designated worker or employee, crowdsourcing means to outsource a job on a microscopic level of granularity to a large, anonymous crowd of workers in the form of an open call. The work is organized at a finer granularity and jobs are split into cheap micro-tasks that can be fast performed by the crowd. Using a crowd with many internationally widespread workers and the flexibility of micro-payment services, crowdsourcing platforms allow to solve problems and conduct tasks which are simple for humans but (still too) difficult for machine clouds, such as digitalization of contents, image tagging, text recognition, surveys, software testing, knowledge gathering, creation of products or viral campaigns. The application of the crowdsourcing approach in enterprise or mobile environments is still in the beginning and will become more important in the next few years. Enterprise crowdsourcing subsumes all crowdsourcing applications for businesses. Here, a single business acts as a provider of all tasks that are either fully or partially public, or limited to the company’s own employees.

In this talk, we discuss the following questions. What is crowdsourcing and how does it work? Who are the humans behind the crowd? How can crowdsourcing be used? How can crowdsourcing be used in enterprises? Are there consequences on higher education?