Abstract:

Background:
The University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE) is one of the ten largest universities in Germany and offers about 43,000 students a broad academic spectrum with an international orientation ranging from the humanities, social and educational sciences to economics and engineering to natural sciences, including medicine. The rectorate and the universities’ central units – namely the Center for Higher Education Development and Quality Enhancement (CHEDQE), the University Library (UL), the Center of Information and Media Services (CIM), as well as the Center for Teacher Education (CTE) and the Chair of Educational Media and Knowledge Management of the Faculty of Educational Sciences – have a common goal: to build a successful and sustainable digital campus for a very diverse student body and to ensure excellent learning conditions.

Objectives:
With respect to the very diverse personal backgrounds and living conditions of students in the Ruhr area, E-learning contributes to individual and flexible learning needs. E-learning at the UDE is based on the idea to offering students a greater flexibility in their studies and thereby supporting them towards the completion of their degree, especially with respect to a normal period of studies. Furthermore, digital learning creates open spaces for a new and different form of face-to-face teaching. Therefore, it contributes to educational equality. E-learning also promotes core media competencies which are being considered as key skills in a digital world and thus essential.

Sustainable implementation of E-Learning at the university:
It is a real challenge to involve the entire teaching body, and not just those who are familiar with E-learning. To promote E-learning at the UDE the rectorate decided to establish a university-wide E-learning strategy. The first strategy was established in 2014 and is newly revised with adapted objectives and goals. The objective of the strategy was to support and anchor E-learning in teaching and learning in order to expand the variety of didactical methods and learning scenarios in blended-learning and online-learning-designs and to respond to the individual student’s needs (ad-hoc, time- and location-independent, audio-visual elements, repeatable content).

To achieve its objectives, the UDE has established infrastructures and a variety of support structures for students and scholars. The E-Learning Alliance at the UDE, which was founded in 2012 and includes five institutions (listed above), put in place a two-year project (2014–2016) to support comprehensive E-learning-elements in each faculty (e.g. flipped classroom, peer instruction, e-assessment), to illustrate the multiple possibilities of E-learning and to be used for orientation. Furthermore, new projects have already been settled e.g. the support of newly appointed professors. In May, the 3rd e-Learning networking day will take place and the new strategy 2.0 is to be rolled out soon.

The paper focuses on the objectives and the initial and further steps of the implementation of E-learning at the University Duisburg-Essen, as well as recent experiences with the projects and their transformation into new E-learning settings. Moreover, future activities will be presented as well as lessons learnt in the overall strategic process, also on the basis of evaluation data.