"Pure knowledge is not enough"

The event, which was broadcast live via video by the Centre for eLearning (Zfe) from the Görlitz campus to Zittau, offered the approximately 50 participants an interesting and varied program.

In her opening remarks, Chancellor Karin Hollstein, speaking on behalf of the Vice President for Education and International Affairs, noted that the ongoing institutional accreditation of the HSZG was the catalyst for this year’s selection of topics and highlighted the close collaboration between the Department of Higher Education Pedagogy and the Quality management Office in preparing for the event.

With the presentation of the certificate for Continuing Education in Engineering Pedagogy for Faculty, , the Day of Teaching was also used to recognize the successful completion of higher education pedagogy training by eight HSZG staff members. The certificate from the International Society for Engineering Pedagogy (IGIP) was awarded to Ronny Freudenreich, Stefan Keck, Thomas Müller, Cordula Paetzold, Sebastian Riedel, Clemens Schneider, Franz Thiele, and Daniel Winkler. The goal of this continuing education program is to further develop the engineering education competencies of our university staff. The next series of events begins in September 2019.

Implementation of Competency-Based Teaching at the Center for Cross-Faculty / Trans-Faculty Teaching

Organizational units that offer modules for teaching interdisciplinary competencies will be consolidated within the Center for Cross-Faculty / Trans-Faculty Teaching (ZfL) as of January 1, 2020. The head of the Education Office, Mr. Sebastian Riedel, provided information on the planned structure and responsibilities of the ZfL. The ZfL, which is still in the process of being established, will offer students in Bachelor and Diplom degree courses a broad spectrum of compulsory elective modules in foreign languages, intercultural studies, sustainability, academic research, and more. With the establishment of the ZfL, the HSZG is implementing both a provision from its 2025 University Development Plan and recommendations from accreditation procedures.

What is it good for: competence orientation in teaching and examinations?

Dr. Anja Centeno Garcia, university didactic trainer and consultant from Dresden, discussed the question of what competence orientation in teaching and examinations is good and important for in her keynote speech on Teaching Day. In addition to legal frameworks such as the German Qualifications Framework, Dr. Centeno Garcia explained to the audience the possibilities of making students' competencies visible based on their performance and formulating them using Bloom's taxonomy or the revised version according to Anderson/Krathwohl. She emphasized that a meaningful representation of competencies includes not only the cognitive dimension ("knowledge") but also the affective ("attitudes") and psychomotor ("actions") dimensions.

Following the presentations, the discussions continued at both university campuses in separate working groups. In addition to staff from the departments of university pedagogy and Quality management, the discussions at the Görlitz campus were led by Dr. Centeno Garcia, and at the Zittau campus by staff from the “Lehrpraxis im Transfer plus” . In the working groups, various university-wide support services for implementing competency-based teaching were presented, and discussions focused on how to describe modules in a meaningful way and what module coordinators need to achieve this. The main focus will continue to be on clearly presenting subject-specific and subject-independent competencies and learning outcomes in the module descriptions, as well as on how these align with the module’s class / course and examination formats.

The organizers look back on a very discussion-rich Teaching Day 2019 and would like to thank the speakers for the impulses from the lectures and the guests for their contributions to the discussions, the supervisors of the working groups for their moderation and all the hard-working hands and supporters who contributed to the success of the day in the run-up to and on site.