Abstract-In light of the increasing technological developments, working life and education is changing and becoming more complex, interconnected and digital. These changed circumstances require new and modified competences of future employees. Education has to respond to the changing requirements in working life. To prepare for this, a technological-oriented teaching and learning process as well as gaining practical experience is crucial for students. In this context, Virtual Reality (VR) technologies provide new opportunities for practical experience in higher education, where they can further intensify the students learning experiences to a more immersive and engaging involvement in the learning process. To evaluate the potential of immersive virtual learning environments (VLE) for higher education and to understand more deeply which kind of experiences students gain while learning in immersive virtual environments (VE) an experimental research study is carried out. The paper describes education in light of industry 4.0 first and gives an overall view of immersive learning and the role of VR Technologies. Then the user study to measure user experience (UX) in immersive VLE is presented. Preliminary results are outlined and discussed with a view of further research.Index Terms-immersive learning, immersion, user experience, virtual learning environment, virtual reality

Abstract. The technological progress in the field of Virtual Reality (VR) facilitates the availability and applicability in learning scenarios. Applying VR technologies in a virtual environment (VE) can further intensify the students' learning experience to a more immersive and engaging involvement in the learning process. In order to use immersive virtual learning environments (VLE) in high school and higher education as a teaching and learning tool, first it has to be assessed which individual-related variables influence the VLE experience and in which way the user experience (UX) affects task performance in VLEs. The paper describes the concept of a specific VLE using Minecraft as a setup for a research study. Furthermore, the research design is outlined. The paper describes the conducted pretest of the study and presents preliminary results of the pretest.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Student attrition in mechanical engineering at German universities currently lies at about 40 %. A lacking sense of practical relevance for a future career are often named as reasons to quit studies. Over the past decade online games have become very popular for educational purposes. The approach of game-based learning, however, has proven to be suitable to motivate students. At RWTH Aachen University engineering students are imparted the relevance of computer science for their field through an e-learning environment including the online game Pump it up! The paper describes the conception and game design of the game including didactical and technical requirements related to it.

No abstract

The development of text mining algorithms is far reaching and thus, new application areas arise, inter alia in the framework of applying modern information technologies (e.g. big data analytics) in order to answer social and economic (research) questions (digital humanities). In this paper existing algorithms to reveal results in the context of benchmarking scientific research clusters are combined. For conducting the analysis, two data corpora are gathered. The first data corpus contains abstracts of publications according to the used application case of the Cluster of Excellence Tailor-Made Fuels from Biomass 'TMFB' at RWTH Aachen University. The second data corpus -based on the analysis of the first data corpus -contains content-related abstracts of research belonging to the relevant scientific community. In the framework of processing the gathered data, information extraction, information retrieval and named entity recognition among others are utilized for analyzing the publications in order to derive useful findings. Furthermore association mining findings are introduced. As an excerpt of the results, the identification of thematic alignments and developments over time are presented for both corpora and are subsequently compared.