Bringing it all together – Gemeinschaftlich aktiv lernen am virtuell geteilten Bildschirm in der Hochschule und digital

Universities and students both face the challenge to teach, respectively to acquire, future-oriented skills, that partially tend to have a clear technical focus. Among those is the ability to work collaboratively, especially in a digital context. The changes in higher education during the months of the coronavirus pandemic enforce the need to create suitable teaching and learning concepts. This article shows how such concepts and their implementation can be conducted and exemplifies this with two modules from study programs in (business) informatics studies. The discussion addresses two research items. Firstly, this is the amount of collaborative activity that students in these scenarios achieve and secondly it discusses the influence on the students’ willingness to work on technical topics in depth. To show this, it discusses ideas on higher education development in general as well as fitted to specific courses in the fields of database systems and data science. It describes which properties a technical platform must provide if it should be used as an operational basis. Furthermore, it is discussed how such a platform can be chosen and implemented. Insights that have been gathered so far during the first months of the research project IoHubHN serve as a foundation for further evaluation within the framework of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Concepts and platforms in this context should be usable for other fields of study as well and are not limited to pure virtual classes.