IMPactDigital is an interdisciplinary project to improve the access teaching and support services of German universities to diverse groups of international students by digital means in order to improve the integration of students into university curriculae based on their individual needs.
COMSYS participates in the project IMPactDigital with the aim of improving available education resources by developing a platform that incentivizes a sustainable culture of collaboration between university teachers instead of avoidable concurrency when it comes to create teaching material such as lecture slides and scripts or exercise tasks up to high-quality exam tasks. We hope to thereby reduce problems especially for new students.
We envision a market for accessing and jointly improving teaching materials without the loss of recognition for the valuable work of dedicated university teachers. In particular, we want to encourage teachers to share their material with others and discuss available teaching materials or directly propose improvements, e.g., because a task contained an unforeseen source of confusion for new students.
However, since different universities and institutes share a common goal in teaching but remain competitors otherwise, such a platform cannot reliably be operated by a central service provider. Hence, a private blockchain network among participating institutes shall realize a distributed intermediary among mutually potentially distrusting institutes. This blockchain-based infrastructure has the responsibity of providing access to teaching material only to authorized university teachers and to irrevocably track the history of teaching material in order to provide transparency about its quality to teachers interested in using that material for their courses.
IMPactDigital, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, is a joined project of 4 executive project partners. The project has a runtime of one year and started in January 2019.
Our Partners
- Medien für Lehre an der RWTH Aachen
- Institut für Technologie- und Innovationsmanagement an der RWTH Aachen
- Prof. Dr. Erhard Cramer, Studiendekan, RWTH Aachen
- Lehrstuhl A für Mathematik an der RWTH Aachen
- Technische Hochschule Lübeck
- Kiron Open Higher Education gGmbH
- Gesellschaft für Akademische Studienvorbereitung und Testentwicklung e.V. c/o TestDaF-Institut