E-TuPrax - E-Tutors in Academic Practice - Establishing learning guides for regular teaching in cross-university/international e-learning scenarios

Project Manager

Mr. Prof. Dr. rer. pol. habil. Thorsten Claus

Project Staff

Mr. Dipl.-Kfm., M.A. Torsten Lorenz

Mr. Dipl.-Ing.(FH), M.A. Ronny Freudenreich

Financing Institution

Saxon State Ministry for Science and Art

Project Timeframe

01.08.2013 - 31.07.2014

Cooperation Partner

Prof. Dr. Eric Schoop, TU Dresden - Chair of Business Information Systems, esp. Information Management (Germany)

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kawalek, University of Applied Sciences Zittau/ Görlitz - Chair of Communication Psychology, Social Psychology and Multimedia Psychology (Germany)

BPS Education Portal Saxony, (GmbH) (Germany)

Brief Description

At the latest since the Bologna Process and the central objective formulated therein of greater cooperation in learning between students of different nations and courses of study, blended learning offerings have become highly relevant for cross-university teaching. The establishment of e-tutors in collaborative e-learning offerings with participants from different types of universities and nations should therefore be further promoted. The E-TuPrax project aims to develop, test and document a holistic concept for the use of e-tutors in VCL-based e-learning scenarios. This is intended to ensure the optimization of existing personnel, technical and organizational conditions for the implementation of cross-university/international e-learning scenarios. Building on several years of practical experience with complex e-learning scenarios and on a qualification program for e-tutors that has already been developed, a systematic qualification and action guideline for the use of e-tutors in cross-university/international e-learning scenarios is to be developed. This includes the specification of the necessary framework conditions of the learning offer as well as an activity profile evaluated in two test scenarios. Furthermore, technical support options for the qualification and practical use of e-tutors will be developed and tested. The resulting concept will be systematically documented in the form of a guide and made available to all interested parties at Saxon universities. The project is aimed at employees of Saxon universities who want to integrate cross-university/international group learning in the Virtual Classroom (VCL) into their university teaching and have it adequately accompanied and thus meets the advertised funding objectives. The systematically tested and evaluated use of e-tutors in VCL learning offers not only enables (virtually) more mobile and interactive teaching (quality effect), but also reduces costs (productivity effect) due to the associated standardization of the qualification of learning guides and the learning support processes, which should lead to an increased offer of cross-university/international e-learning scenarios and thus to an internationalization boost in Saxon university teaching. The knowledge gained and concepts developed in the E-TuPrax project will be made available free of charge to interested Saxon universities and other educational institutions. In this way, the learning and teaching scenarios created can be reused for concrete application at other institutes and used as a model template for other similar e-learning projects.