Sustainability is gaining importance in society, government, and the economy, particularly during today’s rapidly changing environment, due to digitalization and digital transformation. Awareness, as well as systematic and critical thinking, are crucial to address the great societal challenges postulated within the SDGs, and thus should be reflected in contemporary education. Consequently, higher educational institutions face a high level of responsibility to prepare their students properly. Postgraduate programmes for professional training, in particular, have great potential, as the in-depth work experience of students can be leveraged to engage with them as co-leaders towards sustainable solutions in the digital age, from a transdisciplinary perspective. Thus, this paper introduces a teaching framework for digital sustainability in higher education under the light of transdisciplinarity. The framework and its inherent methods are discussed, followed by an exploratory analysis, covering the experiences of over 100 students over the course of two years in a postgraduate master’s programme. We present the results of the students’ learning and ideation process towards digital products/services to tackle challenges within the SDGs. In addition, we provide a critical reflection of prerequisites for teaching the framework, challenges experienced during teaching, and potential solutions, as well as ideas towards the future expansion of the framework.
This study illustrates how different user groups perceive and evaluate the content quality of Wikipedia articles as compared to entries of a traditional encyclopedia. Therefore, an experimental set-up was used with blinded articles of different topic fields from the German Wikipedia and Brockhaus online, evaluated by experts with different backgrounds (university vs. practice) and by students of the field. The findings showed that the quality of both encyclopedias was assessed similarly (intra-group evaluations), although more faults and mistakes were criticized in the Wikipedia sample. However, the inter-group comparison revealed differences in the groups' quality perceptions. This partly applied to the comparison of the expert groups, and especially to the comparison of expert and (non-expert) student evaluations. Students tended to give better ratings, especially within the Wikipedia sample. Most noticeable, they did not detect any content-related faults in both sets, highlighting that further training is needed to improve their information literacy.
COVID-19 has forced universities worldwide to rapidly change their lectures to a distance setting, leaving students to a high degree on their own and engaging in informal learning. In this regard, user-generated content-based Internet platforms (UGC platforms) such as Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook provide users with openly accessible support for various informal learning needs. This research in progress applies a two-staged qualitative interview study with students comparing the situation before and during the Covid-19 pandemic by applying an affordance perspective. We seek to offer differential insights on perceived affordances of UGC platforms and conditions facilitating their actualization. Based on an adapted Grounded Theory-based analysis, the stage-1 interviews have already shown the viability of this analytic approach and that students perceive and actualize a range of affordances of UGC platforms. Facilitating conditions for affordance actualization embrace two main themes: default behavioral and motivational conditions. In stage 2, the results will be verified, and new insights into changes compared to the pre-pandemic state will be derived.
Based on an explorative interview study, this chapter reports on students' usage behavior concerning formal and informal information sources for academic (learning) purposes. In this regard, a variety of information sources was reported, ranging from scholarly materials to applications based on user-generated content like Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, forums, and question-and-answer sites. The findings showed that students' acceptance of information sources varied with an increase in the academic age: the more experienced students were, the more focused their choice of information sources was. Bachelor students utilized diverse sources, while doctoral and PhD students mainly concentrated on scholarly materials and news articles, but used Wikipedia, YouTube, and blogs as well. Regarding such informal sources, bachelor students mainly consulted these for learning purposes, while doctoral/PhD students primarily utilized them for checking up/acquiring information and their preparation work. The results are preliminary in their nature and are to be validated in further research.
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