The University Pearl of the Month August on the topic of “Redesigning Teacher Education” goes to the basic module in media education under the motto “Digital skills for everyone!”. It has been a compulsory part of all bachelor’s teaching degree programs at the Heidelberg University of Education since 2022. The module introduces prospective teachers to key topics in media education and provides them with application-related didactic skills for the use of media in teaching. Before the introduction of the basic module, the proportion of curricular offerings for teaching digital skills was between 40 and 50 percent, depending on the type of teacher, which still corresponds to the national average. The module consists of a lecture and a seminar, the content of which is constantly revised to take into account current topics in media education, such as the effects of digitalization on society, education and schools.
The seminars focus on the role of digital learning opportunities in various media didactic scenarios and the design of your own learning media. Concrete regulations and application recommendations, such as for the use of artificial intelligence in education, are discussed and tried out here. The seminars include a maximum of 25 students. This means that everyone can be adequately supervised and successfully complete their practical seminar work at the end of the semester. This means that with up to 350 module participants per semester, at least twelve seminars must be offered. Since the module at the University of Education introduces media skills and didactics right at the beginning of teacher training, the prospective teachers can draw on the digital skills learned here in the course of their further training and further train and deepen them before starting their careers.
“The basic module teaches future skills such as digital skills and anchors these reliably in teacher training. This has so far been the case far too rarely nationwide. This makes it a model for models for acquiring media skills for the specialist sciences, specialist didactics and educational sciences,” said the jury of the Stifterverband on its decision to award the University Pearl of the Month for August 2024 for the basic module. “Particularly worthy of recognition are the mandatory anchoring in the curriculum, especially at the beginning of the course, and the high didactic effort to impart application-related central elements of media education.”
