On 30 March 2023, the 11^th Day of Teaching and Learning was held at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences under the motto “Learning outside the Box”. More than 100 teachers and researchers in higher education from the entire DACH area participated in the event.

Various social changes, the climate crisis, rapid technological developments, and economic and social challenges demand that higher education institutions be transformed as fast as possible as well. The Day of Teaching and Learning 2023 at the St. Pölten UAS presented good practices with regard to interdisciplinarity, internationalisation, and future skills and allowed the participants to exchange success stories and experiences in terms of challenges and obstacles in interdisciplinary and/or international settings.

Interdisciplinary, Global, and Sustainable Tertiary Education

The keynote was held by Mirjam Braßler from Universität Hamburg. Under the title “The Future We Want – Interdisciplinary, Global, and Sustainability Education and Its Power”, she spoke about the changes and focus areas that universities need to adopt right now: “To enable students to tackle and solve these complex issues, HEI need to implement teaching-learning arrangements that support students’ development of interdisciplinary and global competence while fostering students’ sustainability knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours. With the implementation of interdisciplinary education, students learn to understand, integrate, and reflect on different discipline-based perspectives, which is necessary in order to address the complexity of the problems.”

Bilingual and Hybrid

The different formats including presentations, a discussion forum, a set of interactive online stations, and several hands-on workshops made for a varied programme. In line with this year’s topic, the conference was bilingual and hybrid. A consistent English-language path led through the agenda and several programme items were streamed via YouTube in addition to the on-site event.

Teaching Future Skills

Recent outputs from projects and strategic initiatives of the St. Pölten UAS regarding the strengthening of internationality, interdisciplinarity, and future skills were featured prominently in the programme of the conference: Among them were presentations for the projects “DIRENE – Competences for the New Era of User-Driven Digital Rehabilitation” funded under Erasmus+ and “Interdisciplinary, Interprofessional, and International Design Thinking Lab (ILL)” within the framework of the E³UDRES² consortium.

Curricula Development

In the workshop on the implementation of cross-disciplinary educational offers, instructors Lisa David (Head of LEARN, St. Pölten UAS) and Christina Tanzer (Section Head UAS-wide Offers for Students, St. Pölten UAS) presented and discussed a currently very central strategy in the development of curricula at the St. Pölten UAS: The knowledge and skills of the individual specialist discipline are firmly anchored in the respective degree programme. Beyond that, interdisciplinary teaching and learning formats and internationalisation concepts open up perspectives across disciplinary borders. More scope in the curricula allows for individual study paths.

Trying out Creative Teaching Methods

In the plenary action on “E³UDRES²: Challenge-Based Learning and the Power of Creativity” led by Thomas Delissen (Lecturer, St. Pölten UAS) and Christian Freisleben-Teutscher (Section Head Inverted Classroom, St. Pölten UAS), the participants asked themselves how students can be guided from socially relevant questions to innovative solutions. The attendants had the opportunity to try out the “Design Thinking” method themselves and to see how it might be incorporated into the development of innovative teaching.

About the Day of Teaching and Learning

The Day of Teaching and Learning is an annual conference in higher education didactics at the St. Pölten UAS and at the same time the biggest in-house further training event concerned with innovative teaching, learning, and examinations.

• The accompanying conference volume can be found here.
• For further information on the Day of Teaching and Learning, please refer to our website.
• Here you can watch the full opening keynote.