News

Where is CATALPA on a good path? Where and how can the research center become even better? Recently, the Scientific Advisory Board of CATALPA met in Hagen. The goal was quality assurance: the international and interdisciplinary committee advises the institution on research planning, but also on its structural development. On two days, the members of the advisory board met with CATALPA researchers and the CATALPA office for an intensive exchange.

The advisory board positively evaluated the intended structure of the research center, which was presented by the scientific director Friedrich W. Hesse. The goal is to have three departments, each with a research professorship and at least two employees. Of these, the professorship on Computational Linguistics with Torsten Zesch has already been filled since spring 2022. The appointment process is currently underway for the professorship on learning analytics, and the third research professorship on learning science is about to be announced.

The Junior Research Groups form the second pillar in the CATALPA structure. Here, junior researchers are given the opportunity to start an independent research career with their own budget and one full doctoral position each. There are currently three CATALPA junior research groups. Their work is limited in time in each case. Further junior research groups are in the planning stage.

Common narrative and central vision

Organization and administration at CATALPA are in the hands of the adminstrative office, which, among other things, recently hired two new employees for science management and science communication. Especially on the topic of communication, the advisory board recommended that CATALPA should present itself more strongly in the future with a common narrative and work out a central vision that can be seen as the point of intersection for all researchers and their work. The special research conditions at the FernUniversität with a large "treasury" of data on a very heterogeneous student community were emphasized. CATALPA should deepen the links with the Center for Digitalization and IT and the Center for Learning and Innovation in order to use this data. The Advisory Board suggested that, in addition to outreach at the university's own campus, goals should be set simultaneously at the national and international levels, aligned with the shared vision, to help raise CATALPA's profile.

The members of the Scientific Advisory Board:

• Prof. Dr. Tamara van Gog
  Chair of Educational Sciences, Utrecht University
• Prof. Dr. Dirk Ifenthaler
  Chair of Learning, Design and Technology, University of Mannheim
• Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Ulrike Lucke
  Chair for Complex Multimedia Application Architectures, University of Potsdam
• Prof. Dr. Detmar Meurers
  ICALL Research Group, University of Tübingen
• Prof. Dr. Marcus Specht
  Professor for Digital Education, Technical University of Delft, and Director of the Leiden-Delft-Erasmus Center for Education and Learning
• Prof. Dr. Uwe Wilkesmann
  Chair of Organizational Studies and Management of Continuing Education, TU Dortmund University