Hearing the Student’s Voice

Axel Schmolitzky, University of Hamburg, Germany
Till Schümmer, FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany

Students have a great potential for enriching the learning experience in a class. They have different backgrounds that allow them to interpret the course’s subject from different perspectives. They have different creative ideas to address problems. They may also struggle with different problems from which others can learn. While this great potential is obvious for most teachers, they often fail to make use of it. And without the right triggers, students often stay quiet for various reasons.

This paper presents a first collection of technopedagogical patterns that help teachers to shape their course in a way that students share their experiences, views, and understandings. The patterns help to co-design the learn process and the technology used for supporting this process. The latter is especially important for distance teaching universities. But as the patterns will show, technology support also plays an important role in traditional universities since technology opens new participation channels that encourage feedback. The patterns range from best practices for making use of widely known DISCUSSION LISTS in courses over patterns for exchanging students’ solutions in a RATED EXHIBITION up to patterns that encourage students to critically assess the solutions, e.g., drafts of master theses, created by peer students (in a WRITER’S WORKSHOP).

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