Abstract:

The proceeding digitalization influences teaching in higher education precisely in these times (Hochschulforum Digitalisierung). Recent trends like mobility (time and place unbound), internationalization, diversity and blended learning shape new kinds of teaching (AWS-Institute). The continuing new type of teaching as well as the growing challenges for lecturers in higher education impose new requirements for providers of qualification measures in academic teaching. Lecturers are forced to broaden their skills or even attain new competences in order to teach in a modern, appropriate matter. Therefore, qualification facilities of higher education are in need to respond to these actual conditions.

For years the Center of Excellence in Academic Teaching (in short: ExAcT) is the single point of contact for counselling, connecting and qualifying lecturers at RWTH Aachen University. ExAcT offers a variety of target group based seminars, workshops, networking opportunities and initiatives for synergistic dialogues. Regular counselling interviews as well as surveys on demands given out to different lecturers approve that lecturers request a personalized, career-, competence- and profile-based recommendation of qualification opportunities for enhancing their teaching skills. For a qualification service provider like ExAcT the aim is to identify user aligned and target-optimized recommendations for lecturers.

Various businesses employ recommendation systems for quite a long time, Amazon might be the most prominent example. The concept of user oriented recommendations will be transferred to qualification opportunities in the field of academic teaching. For implementing this concept into a new thematic context it is necessary to identify the functional requirements, which need to be incoperated into the recommendations. The heart of the recommendation proceeding is the implementation of a catalogue containing teaching competences and the individual measurement of them. In this context crucial questions are: How to identify the existing competence profile of a lecturer by utilizing a 360 degree feedback?. Which challenges are connected to this method of gaining information? Once a competence profile for a single lecturer was developed, what data has to be conducted in order to formulate recommendations aiming at an optimization of teaching activities? Therefore a matching of needs, requirements for academic teaching and the enhancement of individual competences to optimize qualification processes are required. The proceeding has to consider complex aspects such as requirements for careers in specific fields, interests of universities and employers, specialist field thinking (e.g. “mathematicians think, that…”) as well as general opinions of other lecturers (“other participants suggests, that…”).

This paper provides the fundamental concept of the process modelling from an elicitation of requirements to survey- and mapping questions and data mining approaches to generate recommendations.

Keywords:

Higher education, qualification, competences, recommendation, career management.