01.04.2024

The 7th International Meeting of the STACK Community took place at the Ostbayerischen Technischen Hochschule Amberg-Weiden from March 11 to 13, 2024. Around 100 people from different countries - including Australia, England, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Scotland, Switzerland, Slovenia, Spain and Germany - took part in the hybrid event. Over the three days of the conference, two keynotes, three workshops, 21 presentations, 22 lightning talks and six posters with results, developments and issues relating to STACK were presented and discussed in 16 sessions. Particularly noteworthy were eight contributions from the African community, which highlighted the rapid developments and user behavior of STACK in the African higher education landscape. There was ample opportunity for in-depth discussions in three additional sessions, which were reserved exclusively for special interest groups for the first time. The event was rounded off with an extensive supporting program including a tour of the campus and old town as well as a conference dinner.

Judging by the overwhelmingly positive feedback from participants, the many hours spent planning, preparing and running the conference were well worth it. A big thank you from the entire planning and event team for this extremely positive and appreciative feedback. But even the best planning remains ineffective without the participants who fill the event with life. We would therefore like to return the thanks to you: You were a great audience!

The program and the list of participants are now available for download on the homepage https://www.oth-aw.de/stack-2024/. There you can also view the posters of the current and past STACK conferences in a virtual poster walk. A picture gallery with impressions of the event and the recordings of the sessions will follow shortly. As in previous years, all presenters will have the opportunity to write a publication about their submission. A template for this will be provided soon.

10. 10. 2023

"Diversity needs digitality" is the title of an interdisciplinary conference, which dealt with the question, to what extent student diversity can be met with digital cultures of teaching. The conference took place from 05. to 06.10.2023 at the University of Bamberg. At the OTH Amberg-Weiden, a first learning module on the topic of complex numbers was developed as part of the IdeaL project and was tested in the winter semester 2022/23 in the mechanical engineering course and related courses. These courses of study are characterized by a high degree of student heterogeneity. For the trial of the digital learning module, the lecture was essentially replaced by the learning module in the regular mathematics course when dealing with complex numbers. In the course of the evaluation, we examined how the switch to the digital self-learning scenario affected the cohort's content-based learning performance. An important question we need to ask ourselves concerns the effectiveness of a digital self-learning module at times when neither lectures nor targeted exam preparation (can) take place. The program includes the paper "A Digital Self-Learning Course on Engineering Mathematics - Experiences and Effects on Learning Performance", which will present the results.
Mrs. Katja Dechant-Herrera will be pleased to be at your disposal as contact person.

02.05.2023

With a delegation of four people from the projects IdeaL and STACK Net as well as from the Service Centre for Digital Exercises OTH Amberg-Weiden participated in this year's International Meeting of the STACK Community 2023 in Tallinn (Estonia) from April 24 - 26. At the conference  experienced and new STACK users met to share their findings, present their projects, and gain valuable perspectives and feedback on their own work. With a mix of talks, workshops, poster contributions and social program, experienced users as well as newcomers were given the opportunity to gain insights into the world of STACK, have exciting conversations, maintain existing contacts and gain new ones.
STACK is the world's leading open-source online assessment system for STEM subjects. It is available for Moodle, ILIAS and as an integration through LTI. STACK has been used in Amberg for several years and has become an important part of OTH Amberg-Weiden's strategy. STACK also plays a central role in the projects IdeaL, STACK Net and in the Service Center Digital Tasks to meet the needs of a large number of students.
In the last presentation of the conference, Michael Weinmann was able to give an outlook on the next year's conference, which will take place at OTH Amberg-Weiden from March 11 to 13, 2024. For further information, please refer to the conference homepage. You are cordially invited to attend this international meeting in person or virtually. The working language of the conference is English. Let us continue the development of STACK and the associated improvements in teaching together!

14.11.2022

Themed "Shaping Digital Transformations in Higher Education", the teams of the STiL-funded projects „Vibes” of the University of Vechta and „ViCo – Virtual Collaboration” of the Bonn Centre for Higher Education are organising the Workshop Conference 2023 as a full-day hybrid event on Thursday, 23 February 2023. The IdeaL team will also be represented there and will contribute a poster entitled "No Plug but Play - The "Learning Hall" as an innovative space for individual learning" as part of the poster session. The focus of the content will be on the possibilities offered to students by the learning hall, which can be used individually and completely freely, which learning and meeting scenarios can be depicted there and the question of why such a learning hall is important.
If you are interested in these topics, please reserve the date of the workshop conference in your calendar now! Mr. Michael Weinmann will also be happy to answer any questions you may have.

27.10.2022

After some time has passed since the last announcement due to the holiday season, we are proud and happy to be able to start the regular update with a bang:

Thanks to the efforts of the IdeaL team, OTH Amberg-Weiden will be able to host the 7th annual international STACK conference at the Amberg campus in 2024, just in time for its 30th anniversary.

STACK has been used at OTH Amberg-Weiden for about 7 years now and staff members have participated in most of the previous conferences or even presented their own work. Over the years, STACK has become an important part of our university's strategy to develop teaching and learning to meet the needs of a wide range of students in different STEM subjects. This semester, we established the "Service Centre for Digital Exercises" to support lecturers who want to use STACK in their courses. A team of 4 staff members implements STACK issues, gives technical support and helps with didactical aspects.
Having benefited a lot from the STACK community in the past, the third-party funded project IdeaL now gives us the opportunity to give something back and host a STACK conference ourselves. IdeaL ("Innovation Network for Digital Adaptive Teaching") is funded by the "Stiftung Innovation in der Hochschullehre" and focuses, among other things, on the development of STACK-based courses for engineering mathematics.
We are also pleased to announce that the coordinator team Katja Dechant-Herrera and Michael Weinmann have joined the STACK International Advisory Board. The Board promotes the engagement of the STACK user community and helps to oversee the strategic developments of the system. The Board also advocates for the long-term stability of the software and invites input from diverse stakeholders.

01.08.2022

One of the four major work packages in the project is the Self-Service Centre Teaching. In cooperation with the university's own "Digital Campus Competence Centre" and the FH Bielefeld, this is now going into operation as the "Service Centre for Digital Exercises".
Our employees Johannes Knaut (management), Bernhard Gailer and Wolfgang Weigl (STACK programming), together with Stephan Bach (task didactics), are now supporting teachers in their efforts to translate classical teaching into the digital age, to provide more individual feedback, to digitise compulsory exercises or exams, or simply to create more practice opportunities. If you have any questions or are interested in this offer, please contact Johannes Knaut (phone: +49 (9621) 482-3731; e-mail: j.knaut@oth-aw.de).
The Service Centre for Digital Exercises will support and advise you with our experience in the development of digital assignments!

22.07.2022

The planning for the "Learning Hall" is almost complete. An innovative space for individual learning with digital media is being created for students in the Faculty EMI (Building G) Room 206 . At the heart of the concept are six high-performance workstations that are independent of the wired power and LAN supply. Thanks to the use of powerful battery packs and W-LAN, the work stations can be freely arranged throughout the room. From the arrangement of the workstations in teaching or meeting settings, to the grouping of one or more working groups, to the completely chaotic individual arrangement in the room, the most diverse scenarios can be depicted: Everything is possible! Of course, you can and should also use your own devices (BYOD concept). One Part of the room can be separated from the rest by a soundproof curtain. This "virtual collaboration space" is intended for meetings on site or via Cynaps system, microphones and camera with teams at other locations inside and outside the OTH. Last but not least, the planning also includes a retreat area for small groups and individuals.
With the completion of the planning phase, a first conclusion can now be drawn. The room identification, the elaboration of the different utilisation concepts, the spatial implementation of the concepts, the minimisation of room noise through the positioning and selection of the furnishings in the room and, last but not least, the consideration of fire protection aspects resulting from the planned fire protection upgrade of the building in 2023 and 2024 have thus been completed. Now the purchase of the furniture, infrastructure and interior adjustments as well as the ordering of the rest of the hardware and software can be pushed forward. Test operations should then start at the beginning of 2023.
In addition to the "digital classroom" (Faculty MB/UT (Building D), Room 319), an agile place for collaborative teaching and learning, and the "creative space" (Faculty EMI (Grammer Building), 3rd floor), students will then have a third innovative learning space on the Amberg campus with pioneering equipment at their disposal.

01.07.2022

The first self-study module for the course "Mathematics for Engineers I" in the area of complex numbers has been available to students for about two weeks now. The feedback was not long in coming. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all students for their feedback: Thank you! Only with your help is it possible to make the self-study modules even better.
From the reflected and predominantly positive feedback, we can see that the many hours of work have been worthwhile. Nevertheless, we have also identified one or two areas where we still need to do some work. The extensions and improvements in the first self-study module will keep us busy in the coming weeks, as will the selection and preparation of the subject area for the second self-study module.

There is a lot to do. Let's get it done.

10.06.2022

Currently, the final touches are being put to the self-learning module for the area of complex numbers in the course "Mathematics for Engineers I". According to the plan, this first module for a better understanding of mathematics should be activated and made available to students by the end of next week.
This self-study module, as well as the following ones, will be implemented with the computer-based assessment package STACK in Moodle. Over the past weeks and months, the appropriate content has been didactically prepared, scripts have been written, the associated instructional videos, some of which are interactive, have been produced and post-processed, dynamic graphics have been created, custom-fit tasks have been identified and realised, and much more. The result is agile tasks with complex feedback trees that provide answer-dependent feedback. In this way, depending on the individual initial value, each student can be automatically given customised feedback that matches his or her answer.
Now it is "only" a matter of putting the finishing touches to the individual components, correcting the last errors and completing the extensive tests.

01.06.2022

We are pleased to have gained another comrade-in-arms. Ms. Meiline Wolf will strengthen our team with immediate effect and will mainly work in the area of media production, especially with graphic design, video production and video post production. We wish her a good start and a warm welcome to the team!

18.05.2022

The time has come: We are very pleased to present the new digital look!

The new website of the IdeaL project is presented at the familiar address. Above all, the updating of the content, the desire for a more intuitive usability and a more modern design were the focus of the redesign. Of course, we welcome your feedback and are just as grateful for suggestions and comments as we are for praise or criticism.

In this spirit: Have fun discovering our homepage!

25.04.2022

At the "International Meeting of the STACK Community 2022" in Leoben, our team had the opportunity to present parts of the results of their work in the session "S2:STACK in action worldwide #2". The content was about the use of feedback in STACK-based Moodle quizzes, taking into account self-regulation and different abilities of the learners.

Knaut, J., Altieri, M., Bach, S. & Strobl, I. (2022, April 24–28). A theory-based approach of feedback in STACK-based Moodle quizzes taking into account self-regulation and different proficiency of learners [Präsentation]. International Meeting of the STACK Community 2022, Leoben, Austria.

01.03.2022

We are pleased to announce that three more staff members, Ms Sarah Klung, Ms Katja Dechant and Mr Michael Weinmann, will join the team today. Ms Klung will take over the area of German as a technical and foreign language from Mr Jia, who is unfortunately leaving the project for personal reasons. Ms Dechant and Mr Weinmann, as project coordinators, will take over time, staff and budget management and reporting to the project funder.

In the next two months, three more staff members, Mr. Michael Seidl, Mr. Bernhard Gailer and Mr. Wolfgang Weigl, will strengthen the team. They will mainly take on tasks in the areas of mathematics, mathematics didactics and digital tasks. Welcome on board.