Studying Business Information Systems for a Bachelor's or Master's degree - young people can register for this at the largest faculty of Business Administration and Economics at Hochschule Niederrhein (HSNR). Business Information Systems is also offered at other universities. So how would it be if the educational institutions pooled their teaching materials for this subject area, shared them with each other and thus exchanged valuable expertise?

Six universities in North Rhine-Westphalia are now implementing precisely this idea. For the "WiLMo" (Business Informatics Teaching and Learning Modules) funding project, they have jointly developed a wide range of teaching and learning materials for the field of business informatics and are now making them publicly and freely accessible via a digital platform. The advantage: as open educational resources (OER), these can be used flexibly by lecturers, students and other interested parties at any time. The project partners are now in the final stages: The results should go online this fall via ORCA.nrw and a project website.

The joint commitment is supported: The Ministry of Culture and Science (MKW) of the state of NRW sponsored "WiLMo" with a total of 1.14 million euros over a period of two years. In addition to the FH Aachen as the applicant, the FH Dortmund, the universities of Bielefeld and Hamm-Lippstadt, the Technical University of Cologne and the HSNR are also involved. It will receive around 158,000 euros of the total funding amount.

At the HSNR, professors Dr. habil. Jürgen Karla, Dr. Detlev Frick and Dr. André Schekelmann as well as research assistant Sinem Celik worked on "WiLMo" and dedicated themselves to the module "Business Informatics Foundation Courses". The result is teaching materials in the form of PowerPoint slides, screencasts, video lectures and manuscripts - produced in the MultimediaLab of the Faculty of Business Administration and Economics. The content can also be used for exercises and exams.

"With the standardized teaching and learning material, we are promoting vocational learning that is independent of classroom teaching. It is of high didactic quality and should therefore be able to be used by other universities throughout Germany at a later date," says HSNR project manager Professor Dr. Jürgen Karla.