Abstract:

Meeting the demand for more relevant practical experience in higher education is a "trademark" of the cooperative study model. However, many regular, non-cooperative degree programs also include practical phases of several weeks or months, which are intended to support the two-way integration of theory and practice. This, together with the strong digitalization push of recent years, has strengthened our intention to design and implement the concept of a digital assistant to support practical phases of study.

Better integration of theory and practice has long been a field of research in its own right, not only in cooperative study programs, but also in traditional forms of study. In the following, we therefore present our idea for the design of a digital assistant that not only takes into account the necessities of academic content, but also the demands of flexibility in practice. At the same time, it can be seamlessly integrated into the students' media use.

The core of our project is the development of a concept for a digital tool to support IT management teaching in cooperative studies. This will then be implemented as a prototype, evaluated and, in a subsequent step, examined for its generalizability to other (management) subjects and forms of practical integration. On the one hand, the digital assistant would help students to apply management methods in practical phases of their studies and, at the same time, it would support the partner companies in creating or selecting the tasks to be worked on in such a way that they are close in time and content to the theory modules learned at the university.

Our project is an interdisciplinary approach that combines topics from many different fields of knowledge: among others, the digitalization of higher education in general, the use of digital assistants in higher education, the personalization of teaching, IT management didactics, cooperative studies as a separate field of research.

At present, the project is in its empirical stage and a number of interviews with teaching staff, students and partner companies of the HWR Berlin have already been conducted. In order to discuss the current conditions in detail across disciplines, topics related to the problem of linking theory and practice in higher education were addressed in particular.

The current paper presents the state of the art, initial empirical results obtained through the qualitative content analysis of the expert interviews conducted, and an early concept of the digital assistant based on these findings.

In a next project stage, the created concept is to be implemented as a prototype. At Department 2 of the HWR Berlin, the digital assistant OKI (http://oki2019.de/) has already been prototypically implemented as a conversational chatbot. The digital assistant currently planned will partly be based on the already existing application as well as on the expertise gathered so far, but will be adapted to the new needs and extended by basic independent functions. The developed tool can be used both during the IT management course at the university and during the practical phases in the company.

Keywords:

Digital Assistant, Chatbot, Theory-Practice Link, IT-Management, Cooperative Studies.