Elisabeth Katzlinger

Didactic Support of Diversity of Learning Styles? Potential Analysis of Three Collaborative Learning Methods within e-Business Education

Media-supported learning scenarios achieve varying successful learning results and consequently students evaluate them differently. The impact on learning success that gender, occupation, graduation level and especially learning styles of students may have is subject to this study. 555 students participated in a transnational cooperation between two universities by applying collaborative media in different e-business-courses since 2010. Thereby three different media-supported learning scenarios were compared: virtual case study, game-based simulation (Beer Game) and online peer review. The results of the accompanying study made clear that different learning settings benefit different learning types. Thus the major goal of the long-term study is to evaluate how specific learning patterns or the different learning types can be supported more specifically by the use of different learning methods. Such approach includes the potential of a better didactic support regarding the diversity of students.

Embedding Interuniversity Peer Review in Virtual Learning Groups

Interdisciplinary cooperation in virtual groups has become a reality and challenge for businesses and institutions in the globalised world and thus a main learning objective for business students. This paper reports an inter-university cooperation between a German University of Applied Sciences and an Austrian University, in which students of both institutions work together in virtual learning groups. They collectively develop a research project concerning “ethical issues of digital communication”. The students pass the different stages of a typical research process starting with a relevant research question towards the presentation of the findings at a conference. For this research-based learning scenario a process model is developed based on established theory and including a Peer Review process for students from three courses of both universities. An accompanying study collects qualitative and quantitative data on Peer Review as a learning method in an inter-university context and the role of media for virtual cooperation.

Public Key Infrastructure for e-Assessment

The development and diffusion process of learning management systems have caused sustainable organizational changes concerning teaching and examination proceedings in higher education. This paper deals with the development of organizational and technical facilities for e-assessment at an Austrian University that meets all pedagogical, legal, and (safety) technological requirements. In order to realize these safety-related and legal requirements, a public key infrastructure was installed in a PC laboratory only used for examinations. The technical and organizational solutions support teachers, students, and examination administration equally.

Peer-Review from Learners’ Perspective

Within the framework of a broad four-year study with 550 participants in the fields of e-business and business informatics that was conducted at a German and an Austrian university, different media-based learning methods and their effects were compared. In order to be able to draw comparisons with other learning methods, a game-based learning scenario (Beer Game), a case study that was worked on in interuniversity groups and documented in a Wiki as well as peer-review were factored into the study. This article focuses on different pedagogical and technical varieties of implementation of a peer-review learning scenario as well as the qualitative analysis of students’ feedback and improvement suggestions. Compared with other media-based learning scenarios, the peer-review method was rated surprisingly positive in most respects. However, the suggestions for improvement analyzed for the present study mainly concerned a lack of anonymity in courses with a small number of participants, a lack of knowledge on the part of the reviewers, a wish for more reviews, the possibility to defend one’s paper after the review and a wish for examples what good peer reviews look like. Furthermore the study mirrors the progress that was achieved in the recent past of the peer-review tools.