Research Areas
The state of the eLearning
In 2006 the following milestones were achieved:
- The Learning management system Stud.IP is now being utilized by around 5,000 active users. About 350 courses in the winter semester 2006/07 benefit from the available functionalities of the system.
- The data of all official courses and staff members are imported and updated automatically from the corresponding planning systems of the university. This automatic support enables every staff member of the university to use Stud.IP for their courses, with minimal overhead.
- All users of the learning management system now have the possibility to ask for immediate help or to report any problems while using the system by calling a dedicated hotline number.
- A large number of institutes and individuals at the university were given the required help using eLearning tools and also had the opportunity to take part in tutorials and training lectures on selected topics.
- Lecture recording is now supported by ELSA (eLearning--Support-Abteilung). Many institutes have shown interest in this utility and make use of the installed equipment to create eLearning material in their courses.
- The learning-content management system ILIAS, for maintaining on-line courses and assessments, was coupled with Stud.IP and is now available for users at the university. Users can access both systems with one account.
- The installation of the e-Classroom for supporting the interactive presentation of learning contents starts at the beginning of 2007.
Events for the masses
In order to increase the awareness of the support for eLearning provided by ELSA at the Leibniz University Hannover for both the students and teachers, two large-scale events were organized in the year 2006:
Under the title: Willst du mit mir online gehen (would you go online with me) all students – especially junior students – were invited to an introductory lecture about the different online-offers in the context of eLearning at the Leibniz University of Hannover. In this lecture, ELSA made students aware of the requirements of online-learning and successfully encouraged them to explore the various possibilities and functionalities of the eLearning platform Stud.IP. The lecture was presented in the form of a show and was supported by some sponsors.
For the second group of users, namely the teachers, ELSA has organized the first eTeaching and eScience conference, to which all employees of the university were invited. Fifteen speakers presented their experiences with eLearning at the Leibniz University of Hannover. More than 70 interested participants attended this event.
And we will go on…
In 2007 ELSA will take further steps for improving the provided services, increasing the awareness of these services, training the users. ELSA will also repeat and re-organize the successful events of the year 2006.
The e-Classroom will start service this year, more connections to the learning management system will be established (e.g. digital collections, integrating the system with the official web site of the university) and new technologies like Podcasts will be part of the offered services.
