News

BRIDGE | | PLATO Lab | New Edited Volume | Funding

We are pleased to share our PLATO highlights 2022 with you in our current Newsletter.
Here you can view the newsletter 2021.

Obituary for Prof. Dr. Uwe Schmidt

The PLATO program as well as the newly established DFG research unit CORE (FOR 5404) mourns the passing of our brilliant colleague and principal investigator Prof. Dr. Uwe Schmidt, who left us much too soon on December 18, 2023, at the age of 63.

Uwe was an outstanding, internationally renowned sociologist and higher education researcher. He was the Director of the Center for Quality Assurance and Development at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (since 2012) and of the office of the Evaluation Association of Institutes of Higher Education (for Southwest Germany). He was a member of the Commission of Institutional Evaluation of FIBAA, of the German Council of Science and Humanities, and (since 2018) a permanent guest in an Advisory Capacity of the German Accreditation Council.

Under his leadership, important milestones in higher education research and practice were achieved, including - but not limited to - the expansion of the mapping to include types of higher education institutions outside the state universities and the reintroduction of degree programs in small subjects into this mapping. In the field of higher education research, Uwe Schmidt headed several successful third-funded projects, including projects within the PLATO program and one project within the new DFG research unit CORE. Despite his recent serious illness, Uwe Schmidt remained actively involved in various interdisciplinary projects, including PLATO and CORE. His unwavering dedication was instrumental in the success of these endeavors.

In his numerous national and international projects and corresponding publications, his particular focus lay with questions of complex interrelationships of study success and quality development in higher education. His outstanding research work is relevant for many domains and helped substantially to reduce deficits and desiderata in national and international empirical research in the field of higher education.

Uwe's contribution to higher education research, practice, and policy is truly remarkable despite his relatively young academic age. In addition, he consistently demonstrated enthusiastic support for the promotion of young researchers. His academic legacy is significant and his work will undoubtedly inspire many generations to come. With his untimely passing, we mourn the loss of an excellent, dedicated, border-crossing researcher in the interdisciplinary community of higher education, as well as a wonderful colleague and friend. His academic work has a strong appeal and will remain an example of an innovative future-oriented research vision in higher education and beyond.

In deep sorrow and silent appreciation, we would like to bid a fond academic farewell to our Fellow Uwe Schmidt. We hope that the family and friends of Uwe Schmidt can find solace in knowing that his contributions enriched the lives of so many people and that his work will continue to influence the field for many years to come.

For the PLATO program and the FOR CORE, Olga Troitschanskaia

New Research Unit Funding: Critical Online Reasoning in Higher Education (CORE)

We are pleased to announce that the new Research Unit “Critical Online Reasoning in Higher Education (CORE)” has received funding from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for an initial period of four years (2023 – 2027). This interdisciplinary collaborative and international research unit aims to explore online learning behaviors and the online information landscapes that students in medicine, physics, business, and social sciences use for their studies. Besides Johannes Gutenberg University, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (LMU) and the Leibniz Institute for Human Development (DIPF), international partners from renowned North American universities including Stanford and Harvard will be participating in the research unit.

For further information please visit our Website: core.uni-mainz.de 

Doctoral scholarships awarded

We are pleased to announce that we were able to offer all five DIAPASON doctoral scholarships and thus support our scholarship holders in their doctoral project for three years.

Further information will follow here soon.

New Project Funding: BRIDGE (Performance Assessment of Domain-specific and Generic Use of Online Media by Young Professionals)

We are pleased to announce that the new collaborative project BRIDGE is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for a period of three years (2020 to 2023). BRIDGE is a collaborative effort between GU Frankfurt (Principal Investigators: Alexander Mehler, Jochen Roeper) and JGU Mainz (Principal Investigator Matthias Cornils) and is headed by Olga Zlatkin-Troitschanskaia (JGU). The aim of BRIDGE is to assess the influence of online media used in job-specific educational processes. In a longitudinal design, the general critical online reasoning (GEN-COR) and domain-specific critical online reasoning (DOM-COR) of young professionals from three different domains – medicine, law, and teacher training – are measured using performance assessments and analyzed using innovative approaches such as educational data mining and text mining based on approaches from computer linguistics and learning analytics. The core of the project is an online training program that teaches participants how to critically deal with online information by fostering self-learning strategies.

PLATO Lab

Our recently founded PLATO LAB has been equipped with a state-ofthe-art eye-tracking instruments Tobii Pro incl. software. This tool allows for to dig even deeper in PLATO’s research on online learning (behavior) and information processing in digital environments. In this context, we are also looking forward to strengthen and further develop our cooperation with other cooperation partners to further build up a comprehensive learning lab at our disposal.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Edited Volume

Our second edited volume is published:

Frontiers and Advances in Positive Learning in the Age of Information (PLATO)

Part I:   Barriers and Facilitators of Positive and Negative Learning in Higher Education
Part II: Learning with New Media and Technology
Part III: Innovative Analytical Approaches for the Modeling and Measuring of Learning
Part IV: Perspective

 

 

Funding

RMU Funding: The Effects of the Internet on Learning in Higher Education

PLATO was granted funding from the initiative fund of the Rhine-Main Universities (RMU), from 2018 until 2020. The RMU funding has been used to consolidate pilot studies on the effects of the Internet on learning and to prepare a basis for a cross-university application to solidify PLATO collaboration structures.
(for more information click here.)

PLATO Funding by the German Federal State Rhineland-Palatinate

PLATO has been granted funding by the German federal state Rhineland-Palatinate, starting in 2019 up until 2023. The research platform is funded at the University of Mainz and is subject to regular evaluation. The aim of the research platform is to consolidate and focus the cooperation in PLATO on the basis of third-party-funded collaborative programms.