The focus is on dialogue with regional stakeholders
CommUniHub creates a moderated space for interaction through which students and lecturers can get to know regional stakeholders and initiate collaborations. It facilitates access to suitable topics for teaching projects and final-year dissertations. This includes research and establishing contact, as well as the joint development of objectives and the implementation of appropriate teaching and learning formats. In addition, training opportunities for students and lecturers, as well as guidelines on didactic, practical and legal issues, are being developed and made available. Results and completed work are showcased on the platform and published via the University Library’s publication infrastructure.
The CommUniHub is based at the Center for Key Qualifications. Three pilot projects are testing the platform and teaching and learning formats:
In collaboration with students and with the involvement of partner pharmacies and hospitals, a model curriculum for the subject of Clinical Pharmacy is being developed with the aim of supporting and facilitating the increasingly demanding care of patients, driven in part by an ageing society. Once the project is complete, this curriculum can be implemented by other interested pharmacy universities.
Students of Digital Humanities are using digital methods to work with regional partners, such as city archives or museums, to bring socially relevant topics to the public’s attention. The project thus responds to challenging times in which text- and image-generating AI makes the verification, analysis and evaluation of accessible ‘knowledge’ even more essential than before for science and society. Materials, modules and teaching concepts are published as Open Educational Resources (OER) on the state-wide Central OER Repositories of the Universities in Baden-Württemberg.
The Nonprofit Board Lab brings together academia, civil society and personal development. Here, business administration students (specialising in Public & Nonprofit Management) learn within civil society organisations how board work, governance and accountability function in practice. Thanks to its modular structure, the Nonprofit Board Lab can be flexibly adapted to other disciplines and is also available for use by other universities.
Operational and strategic integration into university teaching
A key feature of the project is its close integration with the Center for Curricular Co-Creation (CuCo), which is also funded by the Foundation for Innovation in Academic Teaching at the University of Freiburg. Based on the concept of sociocracy, support and expert circles, as well as topic-specific communities of practice, form the core of the centre. Their members, who also include student representatives, are selected on the basis of competence, not on the basis of their affiliation to an organisational unit. CommUniHub project participants can form additional circles within the CuCo, for example with a focus on transfer teaching, or be integrated into existing circles, such as curriculum development.
In addition, a toolkit for impact measurement is being developed within the “CommUniHub” to enable the societal impact of transdisciplinary teaching projects to be systematically measured. The methods and materials developed are intended to be applied to further (teaching) projects at the University of Freiburg and made available to other higher education institutions.
