The Foundations of the Importance of E-Learning

At the University of Padeborn, e-learning represents a supporting tool for education, teaching, and learning with digital media, as well as representing a permanently evolving culture of innovative teaching and learning scenarios in the new tradition of “enhanced learning”. The university’s academic mission statement stands at the center with its stated goal of producing graduates who are “capable of positioning themselves competently and independently in a modern, information-based society, and of acting responsibly and in an enlightened manner”.

As a campus university following the tradition of unifying research and education, the university is focused on blended learning concepts with supplemental online courses and a mix of didactic scenarios; following Wannemacher’s taxonomy, this mix is oriented towards some combination of Enrichment, Integration, Online Learning, Interaction and Collaboration, Open Educational Practice, Games and Simulations, Personalization, and Self-Study. The intention behind e-learning elements is to not just enable the use of, but to encourage the active design and co-creation of, self-directed, active learning tools in a digitally influenced environment. This entails a conscious, compatible interaction between real-world, in-person learning environments in physical learning spaces, and online elements in flexible, mobile scenarios on personal mobile devices. On a technical level, the priority is on avoiding jarring interruptions between media forms and on the feasibility of a day-to-day implementation in a service infrastructure that promotes learning.

Based on the university’s mission statement as the “University for the Information Society”, the use of e-learning strategies, the related use of digital media and tools, and digitally supported methods, plays not just the expected role of an (information) exchange instrument, but rather is at the same time itself a subject of research.

At regular intervals and in discussion with members of the university community, university leadership will draft foci for the field of e-learning (among other things), which are closely related to the general development goals of the university. Thus, further developments in e-learning strategy are in harmony with planning for university development. The current strategy covers the years 2019-2024.