Qualifications

Our provision of university didactics qualifications was designed in accordance with the following principles:

Promoting conditions that facilitate good teaching

This means satisfying institutional requirements on the one hand, whilst ensuring that motivated teachers have access to self-directed continuing professional development on the other. We strive to ensure flexibility in the provision of all our services, ranging from facilitating participation in individual workshops and courses—many of which were developed by or in response to staff feedback—to providing certificate programs in a way that ensures that teachers to develop their skills portfolio in a needs-driven fashion. As a member of the German Association for Educational and Academic Staff Development in Higher Education, the University of Bonn upholds all of its standards.

Facilitating self-directed professional development for the wider benefit of the University teaching community

This commitment is reflected in the individual aspects of the NRW certificate program. In sum, they strive to bring participants to engage in systematically-guided reflection on their own work, to enable targeted skills acquisition and seek to promote innovative teaching/learning projects for presentation to and discussion with interested colleagues, thereby stimulating a wider level of exchange about teaching.

Conceiving of teaching as exchange

Good teaching emerges from exchange between teachers and between teachers and their students. The presentation of teaching/learning projects and teacher shadowing on both a mono and interdisciplinary level are intrinsic aspects of our certified university didactics training.

Early qualification

The importance of an early start on the path towards university teaching explains our decision to train students as tutors and mentors. Working in close consultation with the faculties and departments, the BZH provides a range of methodical/didactical training.

The services which we provide to this end are developed in a needs-driven fashion in response to inquiries and our own collaborative and proactive situational analyses. As such, we are open for a range of corresponding feedback, initiatives and suggestions irrespective of their source. Working as an inter-faculty service provider, we seek to address and incorporate issues with a significance that cut across faculty and disciplinary boundaries, such as the incorporation of evaluation findings (see EvaLS) and the role of central and decentral quality guidelines. Although we attempt to provide a bespoke service, we are unable to provide a service in every case.

We view tutor and mentor programs as crucial to the all-important early introductory phase of a degree program, as they represent an opportunity to provide a bespoke response to group-specific needs in making the transition from a school to a university setting. The use of student tutors ensures an adequate instructor-student ratio and enables students to move at an early stage to address specific difficulties which they encounter in studying. In addition to general mentoring programs for first-year students, separate initiatives cater to specialist and if necessary, cross-curricular requirements and provide targeted group-specific services to defined groups such as first-year students on teaching degrees, students with disabilities and/or chronic illnesses and international students. Tutorial-based support for students in the early phases of a degree program can also help them master exercises or go over course material. We ensure that established modules are subject to a continual process of development tailored to student needs.

The University of Bonn has chosen to respond to the increasing diversity of university entrance qualifications by providing courses to enable, encourage and challenge students from varying educational backgrounds and cultures to reach a shared skills platform from which they can proceed to make the most of their university education. The preliminary course program launched by the faculties under the scope of the Federal-State Quality Pact for Teaching represents an important first step towards facilitating the transition from school to university.

We also recognize the growing need for a greater range of general interdisciplinary qualifications and interdisciplinary qualifications tailored to the needs of specific disciplines. The BZH is happy to respond to requests from subject departments to provide advice and support in conducting a needs assessment in this area and developing the corresponding concepts in response. In this way, we are gradually developing and continually updating a needs-appropriate range of seminars to supplement the specialized degree programs taught at the University of Bonn.

Developments in academic management and progression of the Bologna process have established degree program management as a core task of academic administration. Professional standards in degree program management are intrinsically linked with the concept of a hybrid qualification profile, which must be integrated in peer formats, working groups, programs of continuing professional development and matched against institutional strategies to ensure the further development of teaching and learning. Working within the framework of the joint federal-state Quality Pact for Teaching, the faculties moved in 2011 to coordinate their degree program management task portfolio and increase teacher staffing levels across the University. To this end, the University is working towards the establishment of a holistic approach to degree program and student management. The University of Bonn has identified the following core tasks of degree program management:

• Quality management
• The organization and management of learning and examinations
• The provision of information and advice
• Contact work, PR work and networking

Our service provision in this area is aligned with the skills associated with these core tasks.