Teaching materials from #myfirstresearchpaper are now freely available on ORCA.nrw and twillo
For many students, publishing their own work as a research paper - and potentially launching an academic career - is a lofty goal. To support this, the teaching innovation project #myfirstresearchpaper was launched at the Department of Information Systems at Paderborn University and has now been successfully completed after two years. The teaching materials that were developed in the project are now available as "Open Educational Resources" (OER) on the ORCA.nrw and twillo platforms for other (business informatics) locations. The Foundation for Innovation in Junior Professors and Professors funded the project with 100,000 euros as part of the "Freiraum 2023" funding programme.
As part of the project, a course was developed in which students learn how to turn an outstanding seminar, project or final thesis into a research paper suitable for submission to scientific conferences or journals. "Our project goal was to establish an innovative, digital learning module and increase the number of scientific publications resulting from student work. Together with the dedicated students, we have succeeded in doing this," explains project manager Dr. Christian Bartelheimer, Junior Professor of Business Informatics with a focus on Enterprise Architecture at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. "One particularly pleasing example of success comes from our student Alexander Wilms. He took part in the pilot phase of the project and together we produced an article from his Bachelor's thesis, which was recently published in the thematically relevant and renowned 'Journal of Small Business and Enterprise Development'," adds Prof. Dr. Dennis Kundisch from the chair of Information Systems, esp. digital markets at Paderborn University, who is also the project manager. For the final thesis and the resulting research paper, the collaboration between family businesses, which are characteristic of the Ostwestfalen-Lippe region, and start-ups was analysed. Among other things, the results offer concrete recommendations for successful cooperation between the two sides. In addition, four further working papers produced during the course are currently under review - three of them at a conference and one in a specialist journal.
In terms of methodology, the project was based on the so-called "action design research process", a practice-orientated research approach that is particularly suitable for the development and evaluation of solutions in real, complex contexts. The project #myfirstresearchpaper was divided into four phases: Concept creation, material creation and prototypical implementation, pilot phase and evaluation, and stabilisation and dissemination. In the first year of the project, the requirements for the learning module were collected in order to plan and structure it. In addition, all teaching and learning materials were created. This was followed by the pilot run, during which re-enrolments were collected and detailed adjustments were made on this basis. In the final phase, various dissemination and transfer measures were implemented. To this end, there was an internal university collaboration with the "KoKoDiL" project[1] of the "Educational Innovation and University Didactics" office. This project initiates cooperation between innovative teaching projects and teaching staff in order to strengthen transfer. Those responsible for the project also maintained a close dialogue with the association "Die Wirtschaftsinformatik e. V." in order to make the course design and the developed teaching and learning materials, which are available as OER, accessible to the Business Informatics community and related disciplines.
[1] Full project name: "Cross-context cooperation for the systematic diffusion of innovative teaching concepts"
This text was translated automatically.
