Funded projects
Following its call for project proposals in teaching and studies, the central Quality Improvement Committee of the University of Münster selected 10 projects for the 2025/26 funding period that possess the potential to enhance openness and creativity in university teaching. The funding should enable the project participants to develop, test and evaluate their ideas for teaching.
The purpose of the quality improvement funds (QIFs) is to promote dynamic learning by focusing on innovative teaching and learning formats and improving the quality of student counselling and supervision.
What makes this call for proposals unique is that both instructors and students have to collaboratively develop and submit their applications so that the instruction is entirely tailored to the students’ needs.
Thirty-five projects with a total volume of 1.39 million euros were submitted for consideration. Due to the limited resources, the committee decided to fund 10 outstanding projects from this first call for proposals.
The following projects will be awarded funding starting April 2025:
1) Introductory lecture from the Center for Nonlinear Science (CeNoS) based on “Mastering Complexity to Navigate a Complex World”
Dr Katrin Schmietendorf and Dr Oliver Kamps from the Center for Nonlinear Science (CeNoS) aim to develop an interdisciplinary, application-oriented introductory lecture in collaboration with student assistants and the Faculties of Physics, Mathematics & Computer Science, Psychology, Biology and Chemistry. The lecture will use preparatory materials and accompanying Jupyter Notebooks to address the heterogeneous knowledge and interests of a multidisciplinary target group.
The lecture will be permanently integrated into the CeNoS teaching programme, based on the motto of “Mastering Complexity to Navigate a Complex World” and will serve as impetus for interdisciplinary exchange and cooperation at the University of Münster. Complex networks are a thematically highly diverse and interdisciplinary field of research, as they address many questions from current societal debates, such as the spread of epidemics, the propagation of disinformation, climate research and the optimisation of cycle path networks.
2) Ecological landscape project “Sensorlök”
Ecological landscape projects increasingly rely on measurement data that are automatically and continuously collected by sensors over extended periods of time. In the project “Sensorlök” by Dr Marvin Ludwig, the Institute of Landscape Ecology shall integrate environmental sensors into teaching activities in order to train the next generation of researchers to apply modern methods of environmental observation in practice.
To this end, a part of the climate and biodiversity area Ammeloe, known as the Lüntener Forest, will be considered as an exemplary ecosystem. The former peat forest is scheduled to be rewetted over the next few years, offering the chance to observe the ecosystem’s reactions to controlled environmental changes.
In a seminar, students will equip the Lüntener Forest with sensors that measure, e.g. groundwater levels, soil moisture and the microclimate, and store the data automatically in the Cloud. This will create a kind of open-air laboratory. In a hackathon, data processing methods will be developed to continuously evaluate the sensor data and understand the impacts of the renaturation measures on the ecosystem.
3) Online tutorial for the didactic-methodical qualification of student tutors
Student-headed tutorials have played an important role as a supplementary component of university course offerings since the Bologna Reform. However, in view of the resulting demand for quality assurance and improvement, we find that student tutors are rarely prepared for their role in terms of subject matter and didactics.
The University of Münster does not currently offer a comprehensive programme dedicated to professionalising student tutoring. To address this issue, Kris-Stephen Besa and Annalisa Biehl plan to develop an interdisciplinary online tutorial to qualify student tutors, which can be used at the University of Münster beyond the project period.
The content of the tutorial focuses on fostering social competence, reflexive and self-competence, diagnostic competence and didactic-methodical competence. The tutorial will be evaluated to allow for possible adjustments and to contribute to this relatively unexplored research field.
4) Interdisciplinary exchange between sports and music students and staff on preventing sexualised violence
Sexualised violence impacts many aspects of life, and universities are no exception (UniSafe, 2022). The experience of sexualised violence has far-reaching consequences for those affected, not only in terms of their health but also their quality of life and performance. In the university context, students and employees are especially vulnerable when it comes to relationships of dependency (bukof, 2018). Subjects like music and sports possess inherent risk factors that can lead to sexualised violence (e.g. proximity-distance relationship).
The project by Lena Henning and Isabelle Heiss aims to promote interdisciplinary exchange between students and staff in both subject areas on the topic of preventing sexualised violence. The project aims to encourage dialogue about subject-specific and interdisciplinary structures, sensitising participants to subject-specific and interdisciplinary risk factors, as well as highlighting potential opportunities.
The project pursues two objectives: a) promoting exchange between students in a joint seminar, which leads to b) a moderated discussion between students and colleagues from Sports Science and Music Education.
5) Practical course “Model- and Data-based Methods in the Natural Sciences” (MoDaNa)
In the newly designed interdisciplinary and research-oriented practical course “Model- and Data-based Methods in the Natural Sciences” (MoDaNa), students from the Faculties of Mathematics and Computer Science, Physics, and Chemistry and Pharmacy acquire competence in the field of numerical modeling and the use of modern data-driven methods for simulation. They will collaborate on a current research topic in supervised interdisciplinary teams over a semester, focusing on application-related areas such as climate change, epidemiology or swarm behavior. The students learn the basics of programming in Python, numerical modeling, data analysis and machine learning methods. This includes topics such as research data management, data preparation and visualisation, as well as the creation and testing of mathematical models. They then apply this knowledge to their specific research project. They collect their own data, develop hypotheses, create models and conduct simulation runs. They also present their results to the other participants.
Prof Dr Mario Ohlberger (FB 10), Prof Dr Svetlana Gurevich (FB 11) and Prof Dr Andreas Heuer (FB 12) developed the course together with students based on the practical course “Nonlinear Modeling in the Natural Sciences” offered by the Center for Nonlinear Science (CeNoS). In the long term, the practical course is to become a module of the planned Data Science degree programme.
6) Teaching project "Shared Pharmacy and Healthcare Education for Real-world Experience" (SPHERE)
The new teaching project “Shared Pharmacy and Healthcare Education for Real-world Experience” (SPHERE) brings together medical and pharmacy students in their practical year for the first time to jointly address the growing challenges of patient care. The project by Prof Dr Björn Burkhardt (FB 12) and Dr Hedda Wollbold (FB 05) follows an approach based on the motto “Learn together, care better together”. Participants learn to plan complex therapies in tandem, make joint decisions and engage in realistic scenarios with simulation patients in a patient-centric manner.
The goal is to promote interprofessional cooperation during the students’ studies and to break down barriers between the professions. The focus areas include teamwork, communication and understanding the roles of both professions. The practical implementation takes place on an outpatient basis in teaching clinics and pharmacies.
This teaching format significantly contributes to the improvement of patient care and imparts important skills such as critical thinking and social responsibility. Thanks to intensive academic supervision, the project promotes interdisciplinary care as required in the therapy guidelines.
7) Development and implementation of the AI-based tutor Histo.AI for history didactics courses
Dr Sabrina Schmitz-Zerres and Ricarda Singh (MEd) from the Department of the Didactics of History at the University of Münster will develop an AI-based tutor “Histo.AI” starting in the summer semester 2025 in collaboration with students. Histo.AI will be implemented and evaluated in history didactics courses. In cooperation with the Münster-based Tutor.AI, Histo.AI is envisioned as a subject-specific tool that supports students in creating their own scientific and reading texts. Histo.AI will be programmed to respond to specific needs and learning levels without taking over the task of producing texts for students. Instead, Histo.AI supports students in reading texts and provides feedback on written content. The project aims to individually support history students at the University of Münster in developing their skills through an AI-based tutor and to train them to use AI reflectively.
8) Project “Patient-centered Counseling using Augmented Reality (AR)”
The field of clinical pharmacy is based on pharmaceutical-natural scientific knowledge that aims to optimise the use of medication by and for patients. However, students who expect to have regular contact with patients and steadily improve their skills in patient interaction are often disappointed. It’s only after graduation upon entering their profession that they face the challenge of meeting the increasingly complex demands in counseling and patient care which arise from demographic changes and the individualisation of pharmacotherapy.
To address this problem, Prof Burckhardt (FB 12) and Prof Hohenberg (FB 04) have initiated the project “Patient-centered Counseling using Augmented Reality (AR)”.
By using AR in the study of clinical pharmacy, they hope to gradually allow students to gain competence-oriented training in patient counseling. With the AR tool, it will be possible in the future to practically train students to address the increasing demand for personalised medicine and individualised pharmacotherapy in a targeted manner, and thus transfer the knowledge learned in the course from theory to practice.
9) Project “VR4Students” in the eXperimental Reality Lab of the Marketing Center Münster (XRLab@MCM)
Virtual realities and the metaverse are changing our working and living environments. But lacking personal experience, most people have only a vague or abstract understanding of how these “immersive” VR applications function and can benefit them. Access to the required hardware represents a bottleneck that prevents virtual experiences. Therefore, the project “VR4Students” at the eXperimental Reality Lab of the Marketing Center Münster (XRLab@MCM) plans to offer a leasing service for one year starting in April. The service will allow students at the University of Münster to rent out state-of-the-art Quest headsets for free for one week at a time. The project is organised by student assistants who coordinate the administration, distribution and support of software and hardware. In this way, the project introduces students to the future technology of VR in an uncomplicated manner, while promoting their digital competence.
10) Project "SHIFT happens: Learning with and from an AI-based learning assistant"
Tutor.AI is a joint project of the Faculty of Philology, the REACH – Euregio Start-up Center, and the start-up colloc.AI at the University of Münster. It is a learning assistant based on a large language model (LLM) that supports students in preparing and reviewing their course material. The assistant interacts with users through a chat interface and accesses relevant sources provided by the instructors for a specific course. In the past two semesters, Tutor.AI has been used in 12 courses with over 2,000 students (ranging from Literary Didactics and Constitutional History to Mathematics for Chemists and Autonomous Systems in Computer Science). Special emphasis is placed on data protection, as the assistant is hosted on the University’s servers and uses open-source technology. In the project “SHIFT happens: Learning with and from an AI-based learning assistant”, managed by an interdisciplinary team headed by Prof Silvia Reuvekamp, Tutor.AI is being further developed for the University of Münster and made available university-wide.