Alumni Academy - Digitalisation 20+ and Sustainability. 2021 and 2022

The Alumni Academy returns to develop learning/teaching concepts on digitalisation and sustainability.

The most recent edition of the Alumni Academy has begun, featuring 18 international alumni and research alumni coming together to discuss, develop and implement projects on digital teaching.

The alumni academy consists of a series of interdisciplinary training courses for international alumni of the University of Siegen. During each iteration, international alumni come together in order to develop and implement projects related to the main theme of the academy. These past events have highlighted the important role of international alumni in development policy action, as well as the crosscutting nature of sustainable development in education.

The current impact of the pandemic has highlighted the importance of digitalisation and the associated opportunities for both academic and non-academic education internationally. At the same time, however, the limitations of digital teaching are also becoming clear. This raises the question of which digital formats should continue to be used in the long term and which teaching content should continue to be taught using traditional or blended learning methods.

This current edition will occur throughout 2021 and 2022. In the first module in 2021, participants will work together exclusively online. In addition to four events spread over the year, joint digital teaching/learning projects will be developed in cross-national teams and applied at the locations of each team member. In the second module, the alumni will then meet in 2022 for a week of face-to-face events at the University of Siegen to develop blended learning concepts on site based on the experience gained from the joint digital teaching projects.

After a great response from the university-wide international alumni network, the “Alumniverbund” of the University of Siegen, 18 applicants were accepted for participation. The group of alumni and research alumni consists of teachers from the countries Mexico, Canada, South Africa, Namibia, Kenya, Cameroon, Ghana, Egypt, Albania, Northern Macedonia, Iraq, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China and the Philippines.

The Alumni Academy is organised by the Alumni Office of the University of Siegen, Prorectorate for Digital and Regional Affairs, in cooperation with the Materials Science group of the Department of Architecture in Faculty II, who have received funding for this from the DAAD Alumni Programme with funds from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. The Alumni Academy is supported by the ZFH - Center for the Promotion of University Teaching and the ZIMT – Center Information and Media Technology of the University of Siegen.