With the concept of curated methods teaching, the project funded by the Foundation for Innovation in Higher Education within the "Freiraum 2022" call for proposals is creating a module form that is tailored to the reality of the digital 21st century. Existing excellent teaching resources will be curated and made available to students as digital learning resources as part of a "flipped classroom" event. At the same time, the aim is to create real added value for classroom teaching by intensifying it through more interactive and practice-orientated formats.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic in 2019, teaching in the Statistics I and Statistics II modules was switched to the "flipped classroom" principle: Students watch specially produced learning videos before the lecture session, and the attendance time is used to illustrate, deepen and apply the content. In addition to the existing offerings, the project now aims to expand the learning opportunities for students. Excellent learning resources, many of which are already available online in the field of statistics and methodology, will be combined to create an optimised curriculum that allows a high degree of flexibility and adaptation to the individual requirements of the students. As in the usual "flipped classroom", students access the corresponding curated content before the respective lecture; in the actual attendance time, no new content is presented, but questions from students are discussed and the topics learnt are deepened and applied using examples.

The planned learning portfolio not only allows students to engage with the content at their own pace, but also to select from various formats such as videos, podcasts, slides and exercises according to their own preferences and to gain an impression of whether the learning objectives set by the module are being achieved over the course of the semester as they engage with the material. The resources freed up by the existence of such a flexible portfolio, which were previously tied up by the repeated creation of their own materials by the lecturers themselves, are to be used in the future for individual supervision offers and practice-oriented support for individual and group work by students.

In addition to making curricula more flexible, curated teaching also offers didactic advantages for lecturers and the further development of learning objectives. Introductory modules in the basics of statistics and social science methods, together with the subject-specific basics, often form the introductory phase of Bachelor's degree programmes. Students in the introductory phase of a degree programme often lack the skills to distinguish between good and bad sources of information and to identify the relevant experts in a field of research. Through a transparent and well-communicated selection process of learning materials, curated teaching can also be used to increase media literacy with regard to scientific content on the Internet.

Last but not least, curated methods teaching also enables improved cross-faculty collaboration in methods teaching. Synergies can be created in curated teaching through interdisciplinary or even cross-university learning portfolios, which can be made available as open educational resources (OER). The catalogue of learning resources created during the project progression will also be made available as OER.

If you have any questions about the project, please contact Lena Dahlhaus or Sebastian Schnettler