Research and development projects

Easily accessible digital fabrication methods such as 3D printing and laser cutting open up new opportunities for schools to integrate making into their teaching. Although these devices are now commonly available in schools, their use presents a challenge for teachers.

To ensure that teachers can use making technologies effectively in their teaching, it is important that they are fundamentally familiar with various processes, have already experimented with possible applications, and know which resources they can draw upon. The earlier future teachers are introduced to making, the better: that is why SMiLe—Developing Schools Through Making in Teacher Education.

Master’s students complete the new project-based making seminar of the Educational Sciences Companion Program shortly before their practicum semester, develop lesson plans on making, and test them in a school setting. In a new project-based seminar in the bachelor’s program, students acquire the foundational knowledge needed to prepare for teaching and learning through making. They can earn a making certificate that covers not only equipment operation but also aspects of makerspace design with a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

SMiLe prepares prospective teachers to integrate “making” as a creative and technology-based method into their lessons and to develop Open Educational Resources (OER) for school instruction.

Thanks to the generous support of the KSB Foundation, it will be possible to set up a media center in Universum/Pfaffenwaldring 45. The media center will enable all members of the university to implement teaching-related and private video and virtual reality projects with a training and operating concept similar to that of the makerspace. There will also be a motion capture area and a small recording studio as well as computer workstations with high-performance computers. The FiLL, S4S, digit@L and SDG-Campus projects will also benefit from the studio's facilities.

In the bwCampusnetz project, the universities of Karlsruhe (KIT), Constance, Mannheim, Stuttgart and Ulm are working together to examine the universities' campus networks with regard to their future viability. The aim is to find future-proof concepts and investigate and demonstrate their practical feasibility through prototype implementations. 

The focus is on the further development of network architecture and network design, with a particular focus on segmentation, wireless LAN, VPN and firewall. A network of the future is to be measured by the quality characteristics of security, scalability, reliability, manageability and automation of the network. The existing networks are to be adapted to the growing requirements and the requirements of the BSI IT baseline protection.

The project builds on the successful collaboration in the bwIPv6@Academia project. The aim is to further strengthen the pioneering role already achieved with IPv6 throughout Germany in the area of campus networks.

TIK is responsible for the network access harmonization work package, in particular for the convergence of wired and wireless access networks with regard to IT security and administration.

New edition of the identity management project

The state's universities provide a large number of distributed services and resources. These are offered to members via the access mechanisms developed in the bwIDM project. This federative identity management serves as a model for other federal states. The range of state services available today spans areas from HPC to data and resource management to online courses. The services have successively defined requirements for the central software platform, which has been expanded by many functionalities since the end of the project.

The bwIDM2 project is dedicated to the increased requirements for IT security and takes current technical developments into account. It creates the prerequisites for the integration of services across all higher education institutions and establishes a group/role administration for supra-regional and national communities with delegation mechanisms. In addition, specialist concepts for the integration of a long-term personal identifier in bwIDM, as required for use in research data management, are being developed.

Project website https://www.bwidm.de/bwidm2.php

Partnership for innovative e-exams

With “PePP”, all Baden-Württemberg universities are jointly pursuing the goal of systematically tapping into the previously untapped potential of electronic examinations for students and teachers and making existing experience more widely available. Electronic examinations have become increasingly relevant during the coronavirus pandemic.  The task now is to transform successful approaches into sustainable solutions.
With “PePP”, technical and didactic innovations are being (further) developed in real-world laboratories and rolled out at several universities, tested under various technical, infrastructural and organizational conditions and further developed and scaled in a quality-oriented manner. The aim is to strengthen competence orientation, increase mobility and flexibility and make examinations more learner-centered. Cross-sectional clusters provide impulses for university didactics, support the qualification of teachers and generate feedback on the quality of e-exams.

SusI stands for Sustainable infrastructure for the improved usability and archivability of research software on the example of the porous-media-simulator DuMux. The aim of the SusI project is to make the open source simulation software DuMux available to a wider circle of scientists. In addition, the knowledge gained through the use of DuMux, together with the source code, is to be stored, accessed and reused in the research data management system of the University of Stuttgart.

The three-year EU project AduLeT (Advanced Use of Learning Technologies in Higher Education) aims to identify obstacles to the use of e-learning in university teaching and to develop measures to overcome these obstacles.