Intense work on the OERs during Partners Meeting in Hamburg

By

HSU Team (Sigrid Hartong & Ina Sander)

🇩🇪 Deutsche Version: hier lesen

It is one of the coldest winters Hamburg has experienced in many years, but nothing could keep our dear ETH-TECH partners from travelling to our three-day onsite meeting in the north of Germany! Indeed, there was so much on the agenda: reflecting on the so-far project developments, preparing next steps and, particularly, working intensively on our so-far developed Open Educational Resources (OERs) to get them ready for further international testing and dissemination.

Everything was set up on January 28^th when first our partners from University of Padua arrived (our work package co-leader) for a first pre-workshop in the morning, followed by all other partners at midday – all in their warmest sweaters, thick winter jackets and multiple layers of socks. Our warm reunion, however, let us quickly forget the weather! Also, it was a great moment to introduce our programmer Mirko Lemme  to the partners, who is supporting the technical setups of the OER.

Immediately, we dived into another test round of the OER designs in their current state, as they had been developed and revised by the Helmut-Schmidt-University students in fall 2026. During the testing sessions, it was great to see that the OERs seem to do what we hoped for: sparking people to talk to each other, to share their perspectives, to empathically explore tech and AI usage scenarios together, and to think about potential solutions for ethical dilemmas. But we also saw that the OERs still require a lot more revisions and finetuning, for which everybody provided great input and ideas.

In the afternoon, we split into groups to work intensively with these inputs and ideas, guided by the aim to make the OERs as useful as possible for educators and students while safeguarding the ethical mindset of the ETH-TECH approach. It was vibrant as a beehive whilst we developed new scenarios and storylines, wrote texts and reworked the material. We further continued our work during the next day, but also spend a lot of time preparing the upcoming transition from work package three (OER development) to work package four (Educathons, validating ETH-TECH material). We are excited to hand over soon to our colleagues from Barcelona to lead us through this important stage.

Of course, no partners meeting without discussing project management, reporting and dissemination issues, which we did on the last day. Afterwards, it was time to put the thick scarfs and gloves back on, to explore the Hamburg harbor area! We took the partners on the Elbphilharmony plaza, explored with them the old Elbe tunnel and finished the day with a beautiful boat trip. A true Hamburg experience!

Dear partners, it was a pleasure to host you and we are thrilled to finalize the OERs together with you and our international community in the upcoming months! Also, we want to thank our amazing student assistants Saskia Meinert and Johanna Thor for supporting us during the partners meeting!!