THE SHIFT FROM BEHAVIORIST LECTURE DESIGN IN A TECHNOLOGY-RELATED FIELD TO GENERAL COMPETENCE

DEVELOPMENT – A CASE STUDY

Thomas Richter, Heimo H. Adelsberger TELIT @ University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany)

thomas.richter@icb.uni-due.de, heimo.adelsberger@icb.uni-due.de

Abstract With the Bologna process and the implementation of Bachelor programs, the study conditions in Germany changed dramatically, as prospects for hitherto unchallenged academic degrees (diplomas) suddenly had to compete with other professionals who absolved the far more practically oriented apprenticeships of our dual vocational education and training strand. In order to still maintain the general uniqueness of German academic degrees, Bachelor students have to complete 8-10 courses per semester. However, the former diploma programs, which took at least two years longer than today’s Bachelor programs, offered many courses that supported the development of academic competences, which actually got lost in the toughly organized Bachelor programs.

For our lecture on Enterprise Resource Planning, we experimentally developed a course design that focused on the development of our students’ academic core competences. We implemented this design for our course with over 100 students. In this paper, we first introduce the background, which led to the various design decisions. Subsequently, we discuss our particular course design. Eventually, we present the results from the instructors’, as well as from the students’ perspectives. For latter, we analysed the students’ written self-reflections. Even though this course design was quite work intensive for both, the instructors and the students, the results actually were very rewarding. By introducing our case study as an example, we like to encourage instructors to overcome the traditional behaviourist course settings and instead, focus on more experimental designs.

Keywords: Enterprise Resource Planning, ERP, Higher Education, Bologna Process, Constructivism, Competences, Competence Development, Self-Reflection.

1 INTRODUCTION 20 years ago, when our department was founded, the thematically related lecture on production modelling was held in the context of the advanced study period and thus provided to a small number of students. It included a very comprehensive practical training: In the context of small production scenarios (including a very limited number of suppliers, a small number of production steps, and customers), which they had to go through and model, the students practically experienced the need to systematically organize resources and particularly the benefit of IT-supported solutions. In the late 1990s, concepts and technologies around “Enterprise Resource Planning” (ERP) got more prominent in the discipline and the course became a part of the introductory study period. The size of the lecture rose from below 20 to over 100 students in average; it became unmanageable to stick with the original lecture design, which required a workbench for every student and focused on a high level of direct interaction between the lecturer and the students. However, literature on the lecture’s content still was very rare. Thus, even though less involving than the former implemented lecture design, providing information had a clear benefit for the students as it fostered understanding for a very innovative field. The lecture design eventually turned into a frontal fact-teaching scenario. After computers became more common, ERP turned into a topic of public interest, and many publications followed; due this increasing availability of related literature, lectures that before reasonably were designed for frontal fact teaching became less important.

In the beginning of the 2000s, the Bologna process was implemented in Germany. Very generally, aligned diploma studies turned to consecutive Bachelor/Master programs. Before the Bologna process, in almost every field of study, the students in Germany had to attend various courses that were related to group-work trainings, preparatory trainings for scientific work, practical trainings, writing exercises, presentation exercises, language courses, and interdisciplinary issues. Such courses did not end with examinations but instead the students received a certificate for their attendance (which they needed to qualify for their midterm and final study exams). However, in terms

of the implementation of the Bologna process, shorter study cycles and the mobility of the students, as core aims of the underlying Sorbonne declaration [1], were focused; study programs that formerly took at least ten semesters in average had to be limited to six (or seven) semesters and additionally, in terms of comparability, each course had to end with a written exam. The disciplines found themselves in a kind of dilemma situation as they realized that to some extend, their concepts of academic educational degrees contravened with the concept of a Bachelor degree (which is meant as a professional degree that allows entering the job market): Before Bologna, Germany had a strict separation between academic and non-academic education; practically oriented professionals who worked in the same fields as the academics (just with different responsibilities) were educated through the Dual system of apprenticeships (or in universities of applied sciences): The degree of a “chemical assistant” in Germany results from an apprenticeship that is conducted in an enterprise and does not require the visit of a university. The whole theoretical knowledge, which such an apprentice needs to fulfil the demands of his future job, is extra-occupationally provided in a school (this educational scenario is referred to as the “dual vocational education and training”). How to distinguish a Bachelor chemist from an apprenticed chemist? This was a disconcerting thought as it could be expected that for the enterprises, the practically educated “worker” actually would be much more valuable than the Bachelor alumnus. So, which skills and knowledge is, e. g., to be expected from a Bachelor chemist after he has left the university, particularly in order to setting him apart from the practically educated chemist? In the context of the 4-semesters longer traditional diploma studies, this was perfectly arranged.

In order to preserve the unique features of an academic education for those students who wanted to leave the university with a Bachelor degree, Bachelor programs included most of the theoretical knowledge of the former diploma programs (excluding the highly specialized subjects, which student had to choose for their advanced study period). In order to save time, lectures often were limited to pure information transfer (where testing was manageable) instead of teaching core competences, which actually were required in the future working life as scientists. The general idea behind this concept was that those students who eventually wanted to enter an academic career, could learn the specific academic skills during the Master programs.

This design had two major disadvantages: First, the students had to pass 8-10 exams after every semester; this led to a phenomenon, which we today call “Bulimie-Lernen” (translated “Bulimia learning”): Students massively memorize information just for the exams and afterwards instantly “spit it out” again (forget it) in order to focus on the next exam [2]. Second, we realized that once the students started to write their Bachelor thesis, they revealed being completely unaware of how to systematically do literature research, how to reference, how to format documents according to given rules, how to write scientific texts, etc. We thought that we urgently needed to do something about that issue.

2 FROM BEHAVIORIST TO COGNITIVIST DESIGN In terms of our ERP lecture, we monitored another issue: Since the students did not just need to pass such a mass of exams but also visit the related lectures, they had to carefully choose the particular lectures where their attendance was unavoidable. As for the other lectures, they registered (inscribed), collected the relevant information for passing the courses, and instead of attending, they focused on memorizing the contents for the examinations (even though, multiple-choice tests are rarely used in the context of German academia, most examinations ask for a reproduction of taught contents, mostly, based on PowerPoint slides). The students’ skipped their attendance in lectures that generally were prominent for providing suitable learning resources (for that purpose) and additionally known for mainly reproductive examinations (actually to follow a neo-behaviourist approach [3]) after the first or second lesson (the exact conditions for the exams usually are introduced within these first lessons). The consequence for our ERP course, which provided quite comprehensive learning material, was that lectures, which started with 120+ registered students, ended with 10-20 students in the classroom. In the exam, above 40 % of the students actually failed to achieve a minimum of half of the total reachable number of points (which is the criterion for passing the exam). Instead of pointedly answering the questions, the students often reproduced complete sets of PowerPoint slides in the hope that these somewhere included the required answers. This actually did not just lead to frustration of the students and instructors, but additionally provided a logistic problem, as a far too large room had to be blocked for the whole semester, which urgently would have been needed for other courses.

2.1 The Change from Behaviourist to Cognitivist Lecture Design We changed our lecture and examination designs and followed a more cognitivist approach. According to Bruner [4], the “teaching and learning of structure, rather than simply the mastery of facts and techniques, is at the center of the classic problem of transfer... If earlier learning is to render later learning easier, it must do so by providing a general picture in terms of which the relations between things encountered earlier and later are made as clear as possible.” We designed a set of examination questions that could not solely be answered just by reproducing information, but required a profound understanding of the connections between the ERP lecture and the core knowledge of the discipline (the lecture was designed for the fourth semester of the Bachelor program “Information Systems”). We assumed that if the students were able to answer those questions, they have deeply understood the subjects and thus, actually managed to reach the aim of the course. We explicitly discouraged memorizing as learning technique, as we announced that this would not help for the exam. We additionally completely reworked the whole set of learning material in order to support knowledge development and understanding of interrelations instead of entrapping the students to memorize the contents. Along with the learning material, we provided lists of further literature and published the thematically (per lecture session) related examination questions. We introduced the students in the very beginning of the lecture that these questions formed the basis of which the actual examination questions would be chosen from (with slight changes, such as differently taken perspectives for discussions or values for calculations). After this change, the students did not just have a realistic chance to self-prepare for the examinations and start with this work right at the beginning of the semester, but to actually comprehend the contents. For the oral lecture however, we expected the students to show up prepared (we consequently provided the learning material for each lesson one week in advance). Actually, we were of the opinion that it would be a waste of our resources and of opportunities for the students if a university professor introduces contents that likewise or even with less time effort could be read in a book. Instead of lecturing theoretical facts, the instructor (mostly the professor himself) put the contents of the learning material into a practical context and focused on talking about his own experiences in the field. We kept this lecture design for some years. The number of students who actually completed the course (passed the exam) rose to about 70 % even though the exam became harder to pass. We, as instructors, were confident that the students learned something that actually was relevant for their understanding of the discipline and their future jobs. Anyways, taking the examinations in this changed design took significantly more time efforts for evaluation: The completed examinations consisted of short essays (which in total were up to ten hand written pages per student) instead of the bullet point lists that we received before.

After the fourth cycle of Bachelor programs ended in our faculty, we eventually realized that the students’ lacked very basic academic skills; despite of what we thought in the initial implementation phase of the Bachelor programs, this lack revealed not being a temporary phenomenon (due organizational challenges), but rather seemed to become a trend. According to the results, which our students showed after having completed all those courses for the study program, it appeared that the education we provided suddenly was not “Bildung” anymore but a kind of accumulation of formal knowledge that at its best could be considered academic half knowledge [5].

Providing “Bildung”, is what the German educational system originally focused on, as schools and universities are so called “Bildungseinrichtungen” (institutions where “Bildung” is provided). There is no term in the English language, which can precisely translate the German educational concept of “Bildung”. When translating the term “Bildung” to English, it becomes “education”, but “education” retranslates to “Erziehung” in German. The German term “Erziehung”, however, has little to do with what a person knows but how the person acts. Literally translated, “Bildung” means “forming” and “composing”. “Bildung” must be understood as a holistic educational concept that is not limited to formal knowledge but includes the ability to autonomously collect and critically deal with information [6], as well as competences, which enable a learner to become a mature (reflecting) individual in the society [7]. According to Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is one of the “fathers” of the concept “Bildung”, we think that the central aims of institutional education should be empowering the learners to self learn, to self reflect their environment [6], and to autonomously take well-grounded decisions.

2.2 Changing to a Constructivist Lecture Design and Focusing on Competence Development

We thought we urgently needed to intervene against this alarming development and find a way back to what originally was intended by providing “Bildung” to our students.

Alongside the lecture’s topic, we decided to focus on fostering the student’s development of more general academic competences in order to prepare them for their thesis and actually for their future working life. We implemented several changes for the ERP course: The lecture did not take place in a weekly turn but was organized in (actually 5) block sessions. The student’s participation became mandatory and missing more than one of those “block sessions” inevitably led to the exclusion from the course. The course instructors’ teaching activities were limited to two sessions: We held an initial lecture session, in which the course subject was basically explained and set into the context of the discipline and a concluding lecture session in the very end. In the initial lecture session, we further on introduced the concept of the lecture itself, the basic rules, and organizational issues. After that first initial lecture session, we laid the responsibility for the rest of the course into the hands of the students and retreated towards a counselling role instead of our role as information providers. We particularly wanted to support the students’ competences in self-learning and group work.

We planned to randomly build large groups. We explicitly did not allow the students to arrange themselves into groups, because we wanted to provide a more realistic situation of teamwork, similar to what they will experience in the contexts of their later professional work; having to deal and work with “unknown” persons. In this setting, the students were forced to fully organize themselves, deal with each other, and constructively find solutions where special (inner-group) challenges occurred. Further on, we expected that following the concept of student-helps-student [8] [9], students with more specific experience in the field (many of our students work apart of their study) would support weaker students to keep inline with the group work. However, we promised to fully support the students in their work and also regarding seemingly unsolvable personnel challenges.

The course was announced to fully being conducted in English language. As we realized that our students often tend to ignore literature in English language when writing their Bachelor thesis, this decision was meant to support them to improve their language skill and to recognize own shortcomings that require further work; most of the discipline’s literature actually is written in English language, so that the skill to read documents in English language is inevitable.

The students tasks were to do literature research in journals and books according to a subtopic of ERP (to which they were assigned), write a paper under common publication conditions, and hold a presentation on their topic in order to share their knowledge with the students from the other groups. The exact setting will be discussed in detail in section 2.3.

In the setting of this course, students actually had to read literature in English language, speak English, and write in English. Also here, as the distinguished parts that were written by each of the students had to be consolidated within a single paper per group, we expected that the students could improve their language skills by learning from each other. However, in terms of improving their scientific writing skill, we conducted very detailed reviews of the papers and intensively discussed the results with the students.

Many foreign students in our university come from Eastern European countries, where Russian is taught as the first foreign language instead of English. Thus, we could not expect those students to having the same level of English language skill as we expected particularly from the German students. In order to ensure fair chances for all students, the final examination was provided in a bilingual version and could either be taken in English or German language; the choice of English language for the examination eventually led to a related declaration in the final Bachelor certificate (which might be valuable when applying for a job).

2.3 General Course Settings The course was calculated for 3 ECTS points, which means a total effort of 90 working hours.

The course content could actually be divided into 13 (basically) different main topics, which in the original course setting were introduced within the distinguished lecture sessions. We structured each of the main topics into subtopics. Each group was responsible for one of the main topics and had to collaboratively write a paper in English language that at least included the defined subtopics. Even though we wanted to give the students a chance to self-set the focus according to their particular interests, we needed to ensure that the very basics of each topic were considered. The length of each paper was limited to 10 pages (using 10 point letters) whereas a minimum of 6 pages of text needed to be included. Regarding formatting and citation, the papers had to follow predefined conference standards. For this purpose, we provided a template, which we adapted from a high level conference. For each group topic, we provided a literature list. However, this list was limited to very basic

information about the different sub topics and thus, we demanded that for each authoring student, at least 2 further resources from books or journal publications had to be found and referenced.

Each group had to present their research results to the other students in order to let them benefit from their knowledge and experiences. Each presentation was strictly limited to 15 minutes (plus 5 minutes of discussion). The presentation language was English. During the presentations, the students received feedback on their work (and presentation style) from both the other students and the instructors. It was meant to support them in order to improve the final versions of their papers.

In the end of the course, in order to complete the learning process and actually support the development of competences, each student (individually) had to write a critical self-reflection paper on what he/she has learned in the course, how he/she experienced the course in general and the group work in particular, and what he/she could have done different in order to improve the outcomes. The self-reflection phase is considered to be the most crucial phase within a constructivist course design, as just through reflection, hitherto intuitively conducted activities can be transferred into competences [10]. For this particular self-reflection document, the students were free to use English or German language. For the self-refection paper, we provided a template (four open question sections), which roughly adapted the concept of Kirkpatrick’s evaluation model [11]. As we already have implemented an official evaluation process regarding the course implementation, we had the chance to fully focus on the learning experiences of the students instead of including an evaluation of the course. The self-reflection document had to be delivered by the end of the active course phase as a part of the qualification criteria for the final exam. After we documented the delivery, the self-reflection papers were anonymised.

2.3.1 Building the Groups From the official registration list (which usually changes after the course introductions took place; in ERP, an average of about 10-15 % of the originally registered students recall their registration), we built two separate pools of students, one limited to German and the other to international (non-German) students. In order to assign students to the 13 groups that had to be formed (one for each of the 13 main topics), we randomly selected students and assigned them. In order to foster international working experiences, we assigned students from both pools to each group. Each of the groups eventually was linked to one of the main topics (randomly assigned).

The course started with 121 registered students of which 13 left after the introduction (108 students remained). As the groups were built from the list of originally registered students, the sizes of the groups did not remain homogenously: Each of the groups eventually consisted of 8-10 students.

The groups actually were far too large in size for the relatively small tasks. The groups had to determine and establish communication channels, decide about the division of the tasks, set schedules, etc. For each group, we provided an internal Internet-based forum on our Moodle platform and a Document Management System (technically those were installed as a single Moodle system but the group’s areas were distinguished from each other). Furthermore, the students were allowed and encouraged to establish their own communication channels, which actually varied between face-to-face meetings, telephone conferences, chats via Skype or other chat programs, and e-Mail. For the collaborative writing, most of the students used Google docs. We actually expected that a major part of the groups’ time efforts would be necessary to organize the groups, the communication, and the work. The groups were allowed to freely distribute the work with two limitations: a maximum of two students could be assigned to exclusively prepare and hold the presentations and one student was allowed to be assigned for the group management and harmonizing the different parts of the document. Anyways, we made clear that the group coordinator would have the most demanding work. In order to do his/her work, the group coordinator was allowed to reject inputs from the group members, if those did not meet the commonly agreed formal requirements and/or deadlines.

2.3.2 Course Schedule The semester included 14 weeks (W1-W14) between the initial lecture and the final exam. In the following Fig. 1, the schedule of the course is displayed: Within the squares above the time scale (in weeks), the students’ activities are shown. All activities until the end of W10 had to be managed within group work. The sessions, where the students had to be present and activities, in which just the instructors were involved, are (mainly) arranged below the time-scale and displayed in grey letters. Please note that the students were free to decide if they wanted to join the Question & Answer (Q & A) session in W12 (voluntary).

Figure 1: Course Schedule

Each group had 8 weeks to do the literature research and complete the papers. The presentations took place in three, weekly session-blocks (each block included 4 presentations). As the different topics had to follow a logical schedule, the presentation dates were predefined in the very beginning of the lecture. The choice of the dates for the three presentation slots actually resulted after the availability of the students (schedules of other lectures) and instructors were taken into consideration. After the presentations, the groups received a first comprehensive feedback from the other students, as well as from the instructor; both gave them hints on how to improve the final versions of their papers. After the 8th week, the paper draft versions had to be delivered for review. The instructors revised the papers within one week (W9) and sent them back in commented versions and with additional change demands. In those reviews, mainly formal and content issues were taken into consideration. The language quality played a minor role; for that purpose, another intensive review was conducted after the final delivery of the papers (W11-W12). The students had to apply the demanded changes within one week (W10). In the last mandatory session (before the examination period started), a comprehensive lecture was held by the instructors, in which the main issues of the course were repeated (W11). The students’ self-reflection document had to be delivered in the end of W11. In the following week (W12), a voluntary session was provided, in which the students were able to ask questions for the examination. In the meantime, the instructors had basically reworked the students’ papers, so that they actually were suitable for the exam preparation. The students’ papers were written under CC licenses and intended to being used as central learning material. The final examination took place in week 14. Two months later (after the semester break), the students had another chance to write their exam (or giving it a second try, if they failed in the first one).

2.3.3 Evaluation of the Course Work

For the successful completion of the course work, the groups had to deliver both in time, the completed papers, as well as the reworked versions after the review. For the acceptance of the papers, they had to fully meet the defined formal standards and to cover the predefined sub-topics. Further on, the presentation slides had to be submitted in time, and the presentations needed to be held. As additional individual achievements, each student had to deliver the self-reflection in time and did not miss more than a single mandatory session. For each lecture the students had to sign in a list.

Inline with the paper, for each group, the members had to declare their individual contribution to the group work and to commonly confirm (by signature) that they agreed with the provided information (of the others). This mechanism was meant to give the group the necessary backup to encourage more involvement of rather inactive group members. The successful completion of the course work was the general precondition to qualify for the participation in the final exam.

Students who did not meet the defined requirements for the completion of the course work, were supposed not to be accepted for participation in the final exam and thus, unable to complete the course; this actually was the case for four students in total who missed too many mandatory sessions.

2.3.4 Examination and Scores

For the evaluation of the course, the course work and the written exam were equally evaluated (each by 50%). Each group member (from one group) generally received half of the total achievable points (30/60), as soon as the course work successfully had been completed. However, in order to finalize the course, the students needed to successfully pass the exam; this meant they had to reach at least half of the achievable points (15/30). This design had the following consequence for the students: A student who usually passes an exam with 50 % receives a 4.0 as score (in the German academic

education, we have scores from 1.0-6.0, whereas 1.0 is the best possible and 4.0 is the minimum condition to pass an exam). In our design, such a student would have achieved 15+30 (45) points, which means a score of 2.3 in the worst case, once the examination has successfully been completed.

For the choice of tasks, we used exactly the same set of questions, which already was used within the cognitivist course design (see section 2.1). This time, however, the questions were not published before the exam and the students were unaware that we would use this set of questions; however, in the Q & A session, we jointly went through the papers and gave “hints” on possible candidates for interesting questions (interrelations that needed to be understood). Different to the written exams in the cognitivist design (which took 60 minutes), the exam within the constructivist design was limited to 30 minutes (half of the tasks were provided). We randomly chose four questions (including sub-questions) from our “exam-question list”, which were related to four different (main) topics; whereas questions to one particular topic (the very basics) were obligatory to be included. The students additionally had 10 minutes to read and comprehend the questions before they started writing (total time: 40 minutes).

2.4 Course Results (Evaluation) We actually achieved extremely interesting results due several reasons:

Usually, roughly guessed, 1/3 of the students who are registered for an examination of a “standard” course do not show up. There might be several reasons for this behaviour, such as having realized that the preparation was not good enough, the students did not attend the course and felt un prepared for the exam, students are generally afraid of examinations, or have decided to take the examination at the second opportunity. Not showing up for an examination without providing a sick note from a Medicine Doctor inevitably leads to Malus-Points; even though Malus-Points are not documented in the final Bachelor certificate, a general maximum amount is defined for the whole study (if exceeded, the student is excluded from the whole study). However, from the 108 students who completed the course work and qualified for the exam, 99 students actually were registered for the first opportunity to do the written test. Two of those did not show up and in total (including those two), five did not pass the exam. For the second try (we provided different questions but also taken from the list), three of those five who did not pass the exam in the first try came again for a second try. In total, 15 students were registered for the examination after the semester-break, of which 2 did not show up and a single one did not pass. All three candidates, who gave the written test a second try, passed it with a very high score. From the 108 students, 58 took the exam in English language.

In the following, we analyse the results of the students’ self-reflections in order to provide an impression of their perspective.

3 THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE STUDENTS The educational concept, which we implemented in this course, followed the basic ideas of Holzkamp [12], who was a follower of the constructivist paradigm and the originator of a related learning theory, which finally led to the foundation of an own didactical school: His concept “Widerständiges Lernen” (resistant learning) follows the idea that learners could learn much more and even achieve basic competences within a lecture, if they had the chance to make experiences on their own. Holzkamp was of the opinion that such “secondary” conflicts during the learning process are positive, because they force learners to develop competences in problem solving (whatever problems may occur). The students investigate the challenge and look for a solution. If they do not get along with the problem themselves, they even start building networks and solve the problem collectively.

We “encouraged” the students to do the self-reflection process in order to give them a chance to explicitly recognize individual successes, challenges, and inconveniencies that they experienced as consequences of their own activities. As many of the students’ problem solutions might have been found on a more or less intuitive level (try and error), it was necessary in order to achieve the respective competences that the students get aware of what exactly they did in which situation, and what actually had been the result.

The students’ self-reflection process was supported by a small template, in which additionally to the actual topics, the general concept of the self-reflection process was introduced. The template was handed out to the students short before the end of the (active) course (as last part of the course work). The students had to complete the template in order to qualify for the final exam. In the context of this exercise, the students were asked to express their very individual thoughts in order to intensify their

learning success. Thus, in contrast to the rest of the course work, the students were free to decide if they wanted to work on this template in German language or in English.

3.1 Self-Reflection Template Design The guided self-reflection template consisted of the following four thematic blocks, which were to be answered with free text. For the students, there were no limitations, neither regarding the length of their self-reflection documents, nor regarding the topics they actually focused on.

3.1.1 Collaboration in a Heterogeneous Group of Unfamiliar People

In this course, you have been forced to collaborate with more or less foreign students. In this difficult constellation, you had to find together, divide tasks, do the work, join the work-pieces to something complete, and finally, hold the deadlines.

What kind of conflicts did you experience and how did you solve the conflicts? What was the situation? How did you react and what was the consequence of your reaction? Whereto did you like to get with your reaction? Did your reaction lead to the intended result? If it did not, what might you have done to do it better?

3.1.2 Having to Work in English Language

Restricting all students’ outputs on English language may have been a big challenge. What did you feel about it? How did you finally cope with the situation (your strategy – what have you actually done)? Has your strategy been successful, so that you produced the best possible result you were able to? What could you have done better?

3.1.3 Following Formatting and Referencing Rules

In this course, you have been confronted with the narrowly defined formatting and referencing conditions any scientific author needs to follow in order to publish a scientific paper. You have been explained that at least the referencing rules are originally those rules, which you will have to follow when writing your Bachelor thesis. However, this might have been the very first time you experienced such “narrow minded” restrictions. What did you feel about it? Did your feelings influence your actions? Did you experience the task as being simple or was it difficult for you? Why? Have you finally been happy with the result you produced? What could you have done better?

3.1.4 Learning for the Life In this course, you have done many things, which were not directly linked to the actual topic of the course. What would you say that you have learned in this course and what else could you have learned, if you had chosen another strategy to deal with the situation? What would you do different in similar situations in the future?

3.2 Quantitative Data and Evaluation Criteria We received 108 questionnaires in return, of which 100 were fully completed. We did not check the completeness as a criterion when accepting the delivery but just if “something” had been written and delivered. We thought it would be useless to force students to do a proper self-reflection (whatever this might be), particularly as students (during production time) reported that this part was quite challenging for someone who is not used to critically reflect about the own work. After we registered the delivery, we anonymised the documents, so that afterwards, it actually was impossible to relate a document to a particular student.

For our analysis, we considered the full completion (all questions answered) as validity criterion. Two of the 100 fully completed questionnaires actually revealed as exact copies. We excluded both from the pool and remained with 98 completed self-reflections (90.74 % of the whole population). In the following Chapter 3, we focus on discussing the results of these self-evaluations and provide information on experiences and special challenges of which the students reported.

3.3 Students’ Direct Feedback and Self-Reflection In the beginning of the course, students massively protested against the demanded mandatory participation during the lectures (compared with other lectures, this was an exceptional treatment), the

randomly built groups (instead of being able to affiliate with selected mates), English as course language, and having to do group work at all (other students before did not need to do so). On the one hand, we expected such complaints but on the other hand, we were convinced of the reasonability of our design decisions, and we knew that all of our decisions were legal. Nevertheless, we listened to the complaints and openly discussed the pros and cons of our design decisions with the students. The argument that some students might have lower developed skills in English language due national restrictions (former educational scenarios) actually led to our decision to offer a bilingual examination in order to provide fair chances for all (see section 2.2). However, above that, the student’s complaints were little convincing as those exclusively were related to a higher level of comfort. Thus, it can be assumed that at a larger number of students actually experienced (at least temporarily) the particular situation of “resistant learning”, as it is described by Holzkamp [12].

After two weeks, the groups were settled and the group work generally was flowing; the students’ comments that could be found in our internal course forum as well as in the forum of the student union and in the more personal e-Mails that we frequently received became much more relaxed and obviously, the collaborative work actually had started. In four of the 13 groups, we had to interfere, as the group leaders were unable to convince selected individuals to accept group decisions and/or do their contributions. Finally, solutions were found that more or less satisfied all involved students. In the following evaluation of the self-reflections, just aspects are considered that were raised by at least 5 students. The numbers in the brackets refer to the numbers of nominations. As the general design of our template encouraged the students to write about what they thought was meaningful, the mentioned topics were extremely diverse and did not allow direct contrasting, so that a structured clustering revealed quite ineffective.

Regarding the first issue (section 3.1.1), the students reported that they eventually experienced the work within their groups as very effective (32), that they actually found a good way to distribute the work and stick to the roles and agreements (17). Students reported a reasonable amount of meetings (online and face-to-face) as a positive experience (8) and found serious work efforts in their groups (5). However, they complained that many group members did not respect deadlines (18), often, communication challenges occurred (15), single group members did not want to do their share (14), and that the group members’ different attitudes to work led to major conflicts in the groups (6).

Regarding the second issue (section 3.1.2), 70 students reported that they did not experience major difficulties when having to work in English language. However, 25 students expressed the opposite. 20 students reported that the course provided an excellent chance to improve the own English skills, which they considered very valuable for their later jobs. 16 students wrote that they actually were able to improve their English skills. 13 students realized that in order to understand texts in English language, just reading did not work but instead, they had to systematically translate them. Most of them reported that in preparation of their future jobs, they should improve their language skill by taking additional language courses. 8 students reported difficulties in writing English and the same number of students (but not the same individuals) complained about the low language quality of the papers, which the groups actually produced. 6 students experienced using the English language as very time consuming.

Regarding the third issue (section 3.1.3), 33 students reported that following such strict rules for formatting and citation was very difficult for them; 16 students found it extremely time consuming. However, 58 students recognized this exercise as an excellent preparation for their Bachelor thesis and future academic work. 11 students complained that such strict rules would be hilariously pedantic and actually far too strictly handled in this course (6). 5 students expressed that they completely underestimated the efforts that are needed to follow such formatting rules, particularly if not actively established from the very beginning. 8 students reported that the provided formatting template revealed as a great support in order to meet the formatting rules.

Regarding the question what the students felt that they actually have learned for their life, 19 students expressed that they got a first impression on how to do scientific work. 16 students reported that they massively improved their English language skill. 9 students welcomed the chance to hold a presentation and 8 students reported that they learned a lot about how to organize their own work. Each 6 students mentioned that the course was helpful to improve their skills in doing literature research and provided impressions on how to avoid conflicts and/or find conflict solutions in group-work scenarios. 80 students mentioned the improvement of social soft skills, which however, were too diverse to cluster them in detail. 5 students complained that they did not learn anything substantial (regarding the course subject) and further 5 students criticised the low level of reliability of the other group members.

In general, 28 students expressed that they enjoyed the course and explicitly welcomed its’ restructuring. The students’ feedback from the general course evaluation actually was very positive.

4 CONCLUSION Summarizing the outcomes of the course, 100 % of the participants registered for the examination and just 3 actually failed (2.7 %). Compared with the cognitivist course design, where we still had a failure-rate of 30 %, the students’ success factor raised by 27.3 % to a total of 97.3 %. This result is particularly remarkable, as even though the exam-questions were exactly the same to the last ERP courses (in the cognitivist design), they were not published to and thus unknown by the students. Even though some students complained in the self-reflection phase that they did not learn enough about the course subject, the students obviously deeply understood the course contents and were able to put them into the context of the discipline.

Against all odds, the students finally reported that they felt having achieved new or improved existing competences, which from their perspective, might prove very valuable in the contexts of their Bachelor thesis and/or later working life. We realized that the students experienced major challenges in doing a critical self-reflection and thus, the results massively varied in their quality. For future approaches, this aspect might be better introduced and/or explicitly trained beforehand.

We cannot determine if the generally higher success level had its origin in the different course design, a higher level of individual support, or a higher level of motivation (or all together). As for the motivation, the students had invested a lot of time and might not have wanted those efforts lost. Further on, the chance to receive a minimum score of 2.3 also could have been a significant motivator.

In order to provide the demanded level of support, we as instructors had to put much more time (by factor 3) into this course with its experimental design than before. However, the result itself was rewarding, and the feedback of the students was very encouraging.

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