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E-Learning at Freie Universität Berlin
E-learning has become an integral part of academic education in many fields at Freie Universität. With its e-learning strategy Freie Universität Berlin aims at furthering multimedia learning in all areas of academic instruction while respecting the didactic specifics of every field. By “blending” online activities into face-to-face instruction, university education gains value as well as flexibility.
Furthering and consolidating its use, CeDiS provides web solutions for multimedia teaching and learning and renders support, training, and consultancy services ranging from phone support for the central learning management system (LMS) Blackboard, to a wide range of trainings, and finally to comprehensive individual consulting. Furthermore, CeDiS manages the university board’s e-learning development scheme, which has leveraged more than 200 projects since 2003.
Amongst these,the in 2008 completed project “FU e-Learning” (FUeL) was also subsidized with € 1,7m by The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). FUeL successfully initiated and promoted e-learning in all university departments.
Services and support »
Guide to e-learning for students »
For further information about e-learning, please contact us at: beratung@cedis.fu-berlin.de
E-Learning in Practice
Statistics Lab
The Statistics Lab is an explorative and interactive tool developed and designed by CeDiS to bring statistics instruction to life: It allows students and researchers to manipulate data and to run simulations in realtime. A variety of visualizations depict data and results, and allow for easy analysis of them. Statistics Lab can be used for demonstration purposes in lectures, as practice device in tutorials or at home, and eventually to conduct computer-aided examinations.
Student motivation and achievement surveys at the department of Economics showed that both learning motivation and exam results improved significantly since the introduction of Statistics Lab in statistics courses in 2004 (periodic “Pro Lehre” surveys, unpublished).
E-Examinations
CeDiS’s e-examinations project adopted Statistics Lab for end-of-term examinations: Since 2005 about 400 students have sat their statistics exams at the computer – either one of our 240 university PCs or at their own notebook.
Project e-examinations, however, encourages instructors of all fields to digitalize examinations as computer-assisted tests can reduce their exam-related workload by doing away with legibility issues and by reducing time to mark results.
In 2008, 545 teacher trainees of our department of education & psychology took their tests in “Teaching German as a Second Language”. Participants of an introductory course to legal English at the department of law also took their end-of-term tests at their computers.
The Learning Management System
CeDiS-Support:
Hotline: +49 (0)30 838 - 54900 (Mondays to Fridays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.)
E-mail: support@cedis.fu-berlin.de
The university’s learning management system “Blackboard” allows for free and easy distribution of course materials as well as course-related discussions between course sessions. Students can access documents anytime and at any place with internet access, and get in touch with instructors and fellow students whenever they like. Several instructors also supervise their students via Blackboard whenever face-to-face is limited or not possible as e.g. during internships or studies abroad.
Since its introduction in 2004, the LMS usage rate has been increasing steadily. In 2008 university instructors provided materials for more than 1,500 courses on Blackboard, and more than 50% of all university students actively used the system for their study purposes.
