Livestream „The New Fiction of Good Science – In Need of a Paradigm Shift?!“

[Music] foreign [Music] uh [Music] uh [Music] [Music] uh [Music] good afternoon and welcome to the science evening the new fiction of good science in need of a paradigm shift that takes place at the occasion of the 150th anniversary of aviation university at the occasion of our anniversary we look back at our founding principles and found that they are still relevant today it was and is the intermediary link between academia and industry theory and practice that is a key element of aviation university in 1870 it was called building vision and canon education knowledge and ability while our anniversary motto today is learning fortune machen learn research act this is certainly still the right approach however since 1870 quite some circumstances have changed and demand today's universities to change radically in some regards we are happy to talk about some of these aspects with you today and once again i would like to welcome you all to this event and especially warm welcome and thank you goes to our host and patron the minister president of state of northern west failure amen lashed we are happy we are very happy that this event may take place or rather can be recorded on the premises of the permanent representation of north rhine west failure in berlin thank you for your hospitality it is a great honor that you will with us today and tonight a big thank you also goes to our other partners the mercato foundation and the chairman of the executive board dr wolfgang rohl stiff and the president professor dr dr andreas barna both of them take part in today's program and the site for it laksgrove be my pleasure to welcome every one of you by name but of course this is impossible so let me by way of representation welcome isabel pfeiffer pensken minister of culture and science of north rhine westphalia karine prin minister of education science and cultural affairs of schleswigstein katharina feigebank senator for science research and equality and second mayor of hamburg thomas rachel member of the parliament and parliamentary state secretary to the federal minister of education and research michael murphy president of the european university association and of course all our speakers i hope this evening will be inspiring as well as entertaining for everybody listening and now i give the word end the floor to manfred nethergoven chancellor of avita aachen university thank you so much mr rector ladies and gentlemen i'm really glad that we can finally have the science evening given the boundary conditions it's rather virtual it's the boundary conditions of pandemic but maybe we'll have to get used to this kind of virtual surrounding maybe this might be the future that lies ahead of us anyway i was very enthusiastic to have this event in berlin because i would like to i wanted to like i wanted to turn around the conventional prejudices that people in berlin might have vis-a-vis the rwth and aachen a fine but conservative school that deals mainly with mechanical engineering and the like this is not true in fact it is a very fine school enormously pragmatic and very much aware of the changes in the industry when it comes to research disruption in many fields that are rather relevant not just in research but also in teaching and education like every so often it is not just one phenomenon that triggers change it's not just a very rapid development caused by research and artificial intelligence machine learning additive manufacturing next generation computing and new materials that make these things possible there are also changes on the labor market i wouldn't call it gig economy but certainly there is a new role in the new important importance of retainment when it comes to recruiting staff there's a new important of keeping your knowledge up to date permanently permanently throughout your life and professional and entrepreneurial careers tend to become less conventional so what is in it for us the rwth will we still exist in 150 years from now there's a good chance that we will still be around as an institution but there is also a very very very strong probability that our teaching will take place in a whole range of different formats we will be more personal and more personable when it comes to giving answers to students and staff in the end we might have to face the challenge of finding the magic sauce that enables people to learn how to learn this conference is just a start in finding answers to the questions that i mentioned just now but i hope that you will be have a that you will have a very interesting evening and this is a good start and i hope that you will be just as enthused as i was when the idea of this conference came all about i think he's there right he's there so our next speaker is a longtime friend of the university a man with a strong impact on innovation and many many many improvements in the federal state of northwest failure and beyond the prime minister of northwest failure ami lashed as you've heard also the the owner of this building and our host in a way and we're extremely pleased that he's with us and he will speak to you just now please welcome amin lashed [Music] [Music] dear minister dear ministers the lady senator the parliamentary state secretary dear state secretary director rudiger dear chancellor netikovan ladies and gentlemen i would like to welcome you all very warmly to the science evening of aachen university here in the embassy of the west as we call it at our state representation in berlin and i also welcome all those who have joined us digitally today we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of aachen university this year at last it must be said after this was unfortunately not possible in the actual anniversary year of 2020 due to the corona pandemic now we are making up for it even if restrictions have to continue in some areas however today we can realize the excellent idea idea of showcasing aachen's university's achievements here in our nation's capital on the on its impressive anniversary with this science evening truth be told aachen university is highly presentable not just at home but also nationally and internationally she is a very special birthday girl if you look at her beginnings even something like a wunderkind pro digikey for it's quite incredible what became of a donation of five thousand dollars that prusian prince friedrich wilhelm accepted in aachen in 1858 for charitable purposes as it is said it isn't amazing success story that it was then through the initial spark of this donation after some back and forth and competition between argent koblenz cologne and bonn that the royal reenish westphalian polytechnic school at arghan was founded and it seems quite unbelievable how a polytechnical school which opened its doors on 10th of october 1870 with 30 32 teachers and 20 223 students has grown and flourished over the following one hundred and fifty years because today the archan university with around 45 000 students is not only the largest technical university in germany it is also one of the leaders in innovative research in germany it unites three clusters of excellence under one roof it has produced no fewer than five nobel prize winners no university applies for more patents nationwide achen university produces an enormous number of spin-offs every year 75 spin-offs in 2020. and it is also extremely successful in attracting third party funding it has done much to make germany a world leader in mechanical engineering electrical engineering and drive technology today and a degree from aachen university today provides the best possible foundation for many new career fields and innovations in the digital ceremony in this way a constant strong current streams from aachen university a current of innovations of practical applications of economic impulses and of course of good science in teaching and research making good on the university's motto learning researching doing in 150 years the aachen university has become an outstanding beacon of science and i would like to thank and congratulate everyone who has contributed to this success and continues to do so incidentally this also applies to the topic of digitalization at universities aachen university is a leader in this field the corona pandemic has acted like a magnifying glass here and has made us painfully aware of where digitalization in germany is still lacking we urgently need to catch up in many areas especially in education but also in the health care sector things are looking a little better at universities but the pandemic has still put an enormous strain on students and teachers aachen university benefits from the fact that it was a pioneer in digitalization even before the pandemic for example with a wide range of activities and projects in the field of online teaching it's precisely this momentum for more digitalization that we need everywhere now aachen university is an active dynamic dynamic institution it is not content to rest on its laurels rather everyone at aachen always asks how can we secure good science and teaching in the future too this is a question that not only the institutions of science but we all should be asking because in recent years we all have seen that there are currents in society that deny the status of well-founded scientific findings and present them as the mere opinion of a dubious elite this becomes clear with the example of climate change as well as those who simply want to think away the corona virus in a twisted way it is important that we clearly stand by scientists who are sometimes attacked and defamed to defend and protect them against such tendencies there must be no turning away from scientific criteria such as rationality verifiable results disclosure of sources and methods no turning away from public debates within science and from debating scientific scientific results in public scientific knowledge must remain the most important compass of our society this compass is not infallible but it is the most reliable one we have none of the major challenges we face can be without the sciences and that is certainly one of the central reasons why we need to strengthen scientific work research and teaching at universities and in the applied sciences wherever possible we can do this by respecting scientific autonomy so that the high standards of scientific work can be shaped and controlled by the associations and bodies of science in the universities on the committees and boards i know this is not always successful but by maintaining and improving their performance through funding and equipment by not putting unnecessary shakers on universities and colleges for example through excisive bureaucracy there is still a lot that can be approved in australia's failure we have set out to give autonomy back to the universities law of freedom for the universities we called it and last but not least we must work together to ensure that our universities are and remain places for an open exchange of ideas and opinions science and research must always be able to push the boundaries of previous knowledge and raise entirely new questions at the same time they must always face critical questions explain results and remain accessible to all those who have to who are interested in its reasons and backgrounds and it is my personal wish that an openness for exploratory questions new ideas different perspectives and fresh approaches would return to discussions in many fields we need a desire for productive public debate we need science for this and that is why it is so important that we protect and strengthen it so that success stories such as aachen university's incredible rise over 150 years can continue to be written once again i would like to thank you very much for this welcome you all once again to our state representation and wish you all a stimulating and fruitful science evening just in this time we need excellent science we need the archan university thank you so much mr prime minister it's my first time that i stand next to a person speaking to an audience and i was really delightful listening to you he gave us a big picture a bigger picture also of the impact of science in the in a society what it is how important it is to remove the shackles that's really important and you gave us one very nice word the the prodigy the wunderkind yeah we will use this in our next press release thank you so much for giving us this and having us use the premises it was really really nice of having you here thank you so much and now it's an honor and a privilege for me to announce as a sign of supreme attention the chancellor the head of the german government angela merkel she will speak to us very briefly on her views on the subject she was bestowed with the charlemagne award a couple of years ago when she was talking to students at rwt ahen and it was really really really striking how knowledgeable she was about things in higher education bologna reform things happening in scientific careers and it made us clear too uh it made it clear to us how much it helps to be a physicist after all and she really is very knowledgeable and you will know when she was talking to you that she really knows what she's talking about thank you so much for having angela merkel talk to us land deutschland ali scooter and herzley well a big a very big and tardy thank you to our federal chancellor dr angela merkel [Music] ladies and gentlemen welcome to our first panel for hundreds of years actually universities could be characterized by a symbiosis between teaching and research but when we listen to what the speakers before said listen to that closely uh like our motto is lanin fashion machen if we look at the tendency of the recent years actually the recent decades of asking that universities should not only be the ones who put innovations into their minds first ideas but also put them into the market transfer them to the market the third mission should be or is established and especially for a university of technology like ours and you heard that from our mr president amin lashed pointing out the 75 companies that were spinned out last year out of our university this seems to have a vital role not only for the third third mission but also to make the world to some extent a better place but talking about technology what we all can also see is that technology basically changes the way we're doing research and teaching and you also heard that from i'm in lesson also from our chancellor when he talked about digital learning and we'll see later on what the ceo from alex has to say about that but the question is there's so many new things within the recent years coming to the universities like the third mission like digital learning what should the university really do is it a model is it a top model is it a supermodel what should be the future actually we have a great lineup of speakers and we'd like to discuss this on our panel yeah and to think of the university as an innovative supermodel um we um we will have to think often outside the box or at least we say so we have to think outside the box our panelists will consider what is this box in the first place like excellence in research and in teaching with both impact on the local sphere as well as internationally and while we certainly have to establish core principles for innovation how can we still make room for serendipity for adaptation for seizing new opportunities and what are the views on all of this from outside the box from industry from art here are the people who have some of the answers [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] we would like to start with our first speaker um whom we gonna welcome um viazoom um so um in your initial quote you actually said that universities have to fulfill international standards on the one hand but also have a regional responsibility can you elaborate on that a little further for us to make us understand that yes of course and thank you very much for having me with you happy birthday in the first place uh indeed uh global responsibility can and should be a driver for universities as we heard from the prime minister and from the chancellor be it climate change or biodiversity all these are drivers international challenges that also pose a challenge to universities but i should add social cohesion cross-cultural understanding the development of key enabling technologies all this is a challenge and universities have to find answers and we already heard the word curiosity it is the curiosity of the researchers in a given place at a university it's the curiosity of students and staff that drive universities so answers to global and international challenges have to be found on a local level but at the same time universities have to measure themselves internationally they have to compare themselves internationally if we look at international university rankings we don't actually see many german universities ranking amongst the top 50. should they of course we should not strive for mainstream rather we should strive for creating knowledge that can be and should be embedded into a global discourse and we should find local answers answers which are scalable be it on a knowledge level be it on the level of technical development technological development so scalability of answers should be and could be a key criterion to meet global challenges on a local level yen we continue with wolfgang roar welcome wolfgang grower in your statement you plead for um first taking a look at the box itself before thinking outside of it which sort of makes sense there are certain established narratives about what a university is so from your perspective how do you define the university box and where do you think are its blind spots yeah thank you for this question um before i answer it let me just admit that there was a kind of provocative intention behind my statement because my observation is that this phrase to think out of the box is always used with a positive connotation and this is true i think for the discourse on universities during the last 10 years it was a discourse about opening about opening up the university and the growing number of tasks and purposes for universities and um i think it has nearly become a kind of commonplace that universities should contribute to societal needs to grand challenges and to public discourses and of course shifting mercator and others have done a lot to to foster this this narrative but the main question today i think is how could they contribute how can they resonant resonate to all these societal challenges and um safe at the same time their uh institutional distinctiveness and i think this is a big question uh that universities has to deal with and your question to answer this about what is in the box i think there are two things in the box and the one is the university as a community of people i think this is a main element that remains decisive for universities to be a community of people and people it's trivial to say change and we see that on the level of students on the level of researchers on the level of teachers they all come with different expectations to nearly all institutions but also to universities especially to universities they want to contribute to the common good they want to solve societal problems they want to do something useful and i think this changes an institution from within and the other thing i would put into the box or i see in the box the other element is a university as a place of knowledge production and for knowledge production is true what is also true for the community of people the way knowledge is produced is rapidly changing it's not only about science it's it's not only about disciplines it is about communities of researchers applicants and entrepreneurs and this is a completely different place so my main point would be this great transformation we are in is not something we have to confront the universe the universities from but the main elements of the university what's in the box i think these two elements community of people and knowledge production have the potential of evolving the institution and one last sense uh sentence on these blind spots you you mentioned i think there is no better blind spot detector than universities well let's ask someone coming from a university and asking them about their books so rihanna lechate you're the rector of the youngest and most international university in the netherlands so you already have kind of a special kind of box so what is special about it in particular when it comes to teaching because you were stressing teaching in your statement as well and we all know how that went or um how it was exceptionally challenged since the start of the pandemic so what about your box good evening everyone thank you so much for having me and congratulations also to act in university we go back also for quite some time working a lot together and i hope we will also be able to do that for the near future about the books yes my narrative tonight will mostly be talking about indeed teaching and um of course universities are known to do academic research we also want to have impact with our research we would like to have societal and economical impact with our research and of course we do a lot of teaching but often when we recognize and reward our academic staff for their achievements we one dimensionally focus on their research output and we don't tend to really take into account what our academic staff is doing in teaching and the last year in the pandemic has shown how much we need our academic staff also for teaching our students i very much like the phrase of of raw about this is a community of people that's consisting of staff and students together and the value that our staff has been giving to our students in the last year in turning universities to unfortunately to some extent only virtual environments has been very much appreciated and i think what we need to do also in the future to see how we can build more diverse career paths where we recognize both the research output of our staff and the teaching that they do and also other in order also to be able to innovate in our teaching much more than we've done in the past because we would like to maintain also the the lessons that we've learned in becoming more digitalized universities but in order to do so we also need to understand that that requires a totally different skill set also from our academic style and if you want to excel in that in that way you also need to be able to build your career and that for most of our teaching staff is really quite difficult and quite exceptional so with our recognition and rewards program in the netherlands we are building more diverse career paths for academic staff where they can excel in research but also in teaching and also an impact and we're going to talk about impact later in this panel so for me being able to provide room for everyone's talent that's working in academia would be my future mission to some extent that sounds pretty much straightforward on the other hand and i do welcome thomas girls on stage happy to have you here live on the other hand rihanna ledger pointed out they are on the search for like innovations in teaching so for new things if i look you uh at your initial statement tomasz kiersten he said also universities feel the pressure of rankings of whatever is coming a financial situation on the other hand they should make a detour they should search for serendipity so can you explain that a little further for us well first of all happy anniversary happy 150th anniversary to ulrich rudiger and of course to manfred nitikoven you know to be at the helm of this fantastic institution that we owe this discussion to so i'm not advocating idleness or laziness just to make sure that i don't yeah but i think i bring in with the detour and with serendipity as opposed to the shortcut and as opposed to the algorithm i bring in something that is i think crucial and vital to learning and to understanding and allow me just to quote alvin panovsky you know who fled the nazis during the third reich he found a new home at princeton university and it is there that in 1955 he wrote about in meaning in the visual arts that it is not the work of class 101 you know that that really pushes you forward but it might be a line of erasmus fondratadam it might be a line of spencer or dante or some mysterious mythographer from the 15th century that will light your candle nothing that is on whatever you have to read for that class and he said specifically if you look somewhere where you have no business to find that is where you will actually find and that is what he said is great about the german model as opposed and we're talking 1955 to the american model and these thoughts might sound outdated but they're certainly not because 50 years later watched 40 million times on youtube you have steve jobs commencement speech for the class of 2005 at stanford university now what does he say among many other great things what does he say he was a college dropout at reed college yeah no business of actually going there he hasn't paid any tuition but he chances upon serendipity he chances upon good luck he chances upon a class in calligraphy and he doesn't know what to do with it but he's interested in it ten years later when he builds his first apple macintosh computer this calligraphy this calligraphy class class comes back up in his head it's about aesthetics it's about visual communication it's about design 2018 in august apple is the first company ever on the planet to hit a value of one trillion dollars and if steve jobs who made this comment at the commencement speech at sanford university hadn't chanced upon that one calligraphy class where he had no business of going maybe apple would have been a different project or product and maybe we wouldn't have even heard of it so i'm resting my case in terms of you know really advocating here for serendipity no matter where it takes us and this is a risk that universities need to keep taking with all the business cases piled up behind you know what it is that they're doing i i like that case to be honest but that case hasn't been planned is that right so um are we as universities go on the shortcut a little too often or i mean we can't plan so such cases like steve jobs i mean i love my entrepreneurs but it's hard to tell them what they remember back in 10 years of course no this is about chance it's not about you cannot really generate this sort of thing i would really say if you want to implement something at a university and it might sound crazy and it might seem outlandish if you're studying humanities you know why not you know you know meet up with people that are studying business if you study science why not meet up with somebody who studies art history and you just swap one book per term that you read and delve into or you just go into one class you can attend you know everything the digitalization is happening now all these classes are happening via zoom or other platforms maybe you do that and maybe there's some sort of thing that that connects these students with with each other to delve into something that they're that they think they're not interested in but it might pay out for them in the long term and i think we should keep that you know agility of mind in order to to have great students not only you know focus on what it is that they're doing but also looking at the bright side of things and therefore coming up with much better things once they leave university cool thank you very much yeah i think that's a that's a good point um especially art plays an important role and i actually wish all the viewers could see the background of stefan hilterhouse who i will ask next because he's sitting in his office which used to be a shower room for the miners at parked solvain you're clearly coming from outside of the box um from a more artsy artistic background so when you look at universities like the avita or also other universities what do you observe there in contrast to other ecosystems such as art or culture and what are your conclusions yeah thank you very much firstly i have to thank frank jaeger because he played the ball in the field in which i'm quite intensely working um i i had a very nice with it at the rwth so they get a little bit more deeper in side view and for me the most interesting one was not to see much more the contrast but more the many similarities in our field so both modes to investigate the world and its complexities and here i could see that this relation or to make this relation productive um we we find many different uh encounters and challenges in it to enable encounters not only between humans but also between non-human actors all essential connections that shape and determine our fragile reality and requires a constant learning and unlearning which you already have mentioned but the dialogue between them are so essential universities well universities are no longer places of discourse uh knowledge expertise have also found other power at the only places of discourse but knowledge and expertise that also found other powerful ways to get certified and validated and even as mr jaeger mentioned could even appear through serendipity and these four new forms of knowledges and practices need to have space inside the universities so we need space and agency for the diversity of different voices with different abilities it is a k key element of artworks where you integrate communities their form of knowledge we ask to learn to into unlearn and to listen and re-listen and i think there are a lot of interesting practices which we could provide to or which could be and come to in a dialogue we need even to recalibrate the the social societal and planetary involvement and our understanding of which knowledge matters you already mentioned this we need to re-evaluate even the routines and might learn from other agile and motivating and creative ecosystems and there are a lot of interesting ways how to provide a better environment to learn a social environment and an inviting environment and we have to ask who is speaking and who has the agency to speak and who has the access to universities so we have to rethink the boundaries of uh of the universities itself because if you go to ngos if you go to other agile institutions and and maybe initiatives you see that this openness is has completely another quality so the universities are still quite solid and sometimes maybe not transparent enough and we could do a lot on that to even use this amazing space which probably is the most interesting space for interconnections and diversity of knowledges but it has become quite even uh restricted in its in its in its disciplines and this is maybe one of the most interesting encounters with art and and science could do that we have this once very specialized form to encounter this openness this kind of intersecting works and so we can amazingly learn from each other and i think our wgh is providing this in a very unique and competent field of of these challenges and with the time and the space for express explicitly and i think this is one of them core questions of cross-disciplinary practices and even non-academic forms of knowledge how to integrate these resources we haven't seen for a long and we can approach the manifold and i think we do need it for the planetary and social challenges of 21st century and here it's needed with desire and curiosity as has been said before yeah thank you stefan hilterhouse i think we all agree on that this form of dialogue is is very important however we're talking about a third mission or third pillar which almost seems to be like an own entity um and wolfgang in our conversation and before this panel you were saying well of course the third mission shouldn't be a separate entity but should be part of research and should be part of teaching so what does that exactly mean for university in the future where are we heading the avitera aachen seemingly already does some of these things um right but what's what's the future path in integrating these these pillars first of all my critique was about a kind of delegation of the third mission to to find some specialists in the university uh who are responsible for third mission and and do this in a certain and maybe professionalized of way and i think this is the wrong direction because if you take serious um the community of people and the knowledge production side then it is inherently a change of society and so i think a third mission is a concept that is a part of the university but not as a single mission you could strictly divide from other missions and i like very much what um uh haggis had said to to to create something you could call a functional serendipity i thought while i was listening to you because it is serendipity and on the other hand it is functional for example uh also for the mission uh that vtr has to create new models to create a new knowledge and in the end also to create a new products and i think this is a kind of spirit that is closer to my expectation uh what we could call that mission uh than to separate it as a a certain entity uh in the university and again maybe rihanna lectured at your university um what's what's your take on that how can or how do you already integrate maybe functional serendipity most likely into teaching but also maybe into other pillars well first let me say that in our dutch system you would say that research teaching and impact or what we all sometimes call the terrible word valorization are very much the core domains within the university and all staff members are also expected to perform their different tasks in these domains but i would say that certain people are more skilled in one of these three domains than others and i would like to be able to encourage people to strengthen those skills that they're really excellent in instead of asking all of our staff to do everything at the same time and that's what we are currently doing so i tend to disagree a little bit with the previous speaker that i do think that it should be possible for staff members who excel in certain domains to also focus on that a little bit more than they're able to do now at this very moment so that that would be my take on that um it's also actually if you look at our students they very much also would like to be able to develop certain skills for instance in the area of entrepreneurship or in the area of social engagement and we build different profiles there so that they can also choose what kind of profile would fit themselves besides only doing their core curriculum students are also very much engaged at this moment to develop themselves in various aspects and i think that's good that's good that we focus on different talents both of our staff and our students and not having everyone doing the same at the same time which we would call the sheep the five-legged cheap i don't really believe in that concept anymore the work pressure in academia is really very high young generations are actually leaving academia and they don't want to work in that rat race anymore and that is a very big concern for the future we heard a lot about from rihanna lectured about the pressure which is on people at the university on the other hand if we look at the discussion we've got a lot of ideas which we can actually use in order to give university a special role i would like to focus on on that aspect especially because in the talk we had before you said universities especially have to look at the regional responsibilities so what do you think is the best way for not only our university but our universities in general to to get a new face to get a new idea of um how to work on regional responsibilities well let's take a concrete example ahen is located in a region that is characterized by surface coal mining and the worst sort of coal lignite in terms of its ecological impact and there is a challenge and the transformation that lies ahead of that part of germany to transform that region from a coal mining region into a new more modern region that provides new opportunities for labor and at this same time new opportunities to further develop the german energy system is a huge and fundamental challenge and for that we need this spirit of serendipity of course but at the same time one needs to create an ecosystem that is permeable to the people outside of the universities and at the same time strives for creating the new type of knowledge that is needed to meet those challenges and i agree with rihanna ledger that not everybody can do everything but as wolfgang said to create an environment an ecosystem of joint learning also like stefan hilterhouse said of joint unlearning but of joint creation of knowledge and that's not only research co-creation through teaching is also a new mode of knowledge production and to create that type of ecosystem and make it relevant to the region make it relevant to a region that goes through this fundamental transformation this is a challenge and an opportunity at the same time for an for a university like your university well it's definitely a challenge for us thank you for for like pointing out on that and we are happy that we can at least look at the challenge and understand better uh what for example the society wants but we are also happy to ask us to have industry on board on our panel we are from bmw actually what role can in the industry play to change the university because first of all i mean at bmw i'm responsible for the cultural engagement so we believe in absolute creative freedom and that kind of fed into the serendipity point that i was making but certainly of course you know industry companies have a vested interest in education so obviously of course bmw as a car manufacturer you know has been partnering with universities for decades now when it comes to the core business of you know educating engineers in the best way possible making digitalization um happen and so forth of course with the technical university in munich but also others our ceo currently is engaging uh with the um with the alex friedrich alexander university and erlang in a in a dialogue about sustainability and all the different facets of it but what i think is interesting in this regard is that you know also what is asked for within companies has much more to do with soft skills now than with the hard skills very often times so it is interesting to see on the side of companies to also engage with universities in a way of allowing for people to also fail and fail fast when we look at ourselves what does define us certainly our successes but also about getting up again you know once we fell onto our face or onto our knees so i think to somewhat protect this sort of environment academic environment research in which you are allowed to fail which is probably tougher once you leave the university is also something that you know companies should have a vested interest in so i would say it's of course the core business but at the same time it's about nurturing this sort of dialogue and exchange diversity is something that has been mentioned many times and i believe in that and the company any global company must believe in diversity by definition yeah and uh to add to that i think um no other field is more accustomed to failure than than research or or science in particular um so thank you for this for this insight from industry and when we look also on on art or or the the the artistic sector um stefan hilterhouse you said something quite interesting in your previous statement um you were mentioning that art practices can be a way to intertwine innovation into the ecology of knowledge of a university so what do you mean by that and can you give us a concrete example so we can grasp um how that could look like actually we already have heard some examples i have to say um for example steve jobs but going to the well the question of the creative approaches uh have always been the core of many scientific findings which we already have heard has been a lot of investigations about it that the major inventors are very much influenced by different knowledges which are including art but even beyond and this is kind of a striking and a very clear point but this is not only more anymore just an instrumental or analytical reason which reaches to to this kind of finding and i i come to some examples but it's kind of important to say that great transformations rely on the narratives and the metaphors which are core uh capacity and and even kind of very findings of the art itself and on experimentation so to me the concept of art stands for an expanded reflexive and intervening understanding of knowledges and signs so it's deeply inscribed in in the way how it even does communicate into society we need narration we need metaphors and artists are experts for this interweaving of perspective of complexity so how to give a form into complexity we know this uh mostly artistic uh forms are bringing things together are synthesizing aesthetical and effective awareness is so important for our communication today and even the communication outside institutional boundaries in the social space we need other forms and just the reason itself so these are all abilities essential for the ecology of knowledge i would say and just you could go from the history to have some examples you can ask for example the bauhaus which has an important trans-disciplinary school for architecture design and art as you all know and and it this really did have a big rupture with traditional certainties and build up and came in the end even to apple as you know mit is another big institution to mention as a long tradition and art and was an essential part of of their work between science and engineering there but we have even younger examples like the uh house secretary well did the major and it's still going on a project about the anthropocene and here they were involving experts from natural sciences humanities art and architecture ngos and activists and here you see that this multitude of knowledges came together on a really kind of high same eye level and which way i've been there and it was kind of stunning and another example comes from our place itself in fact we were inviting graduates from prestigious universities from the art architecture and technology and starting everything what has been done from their own questions so even this is who is speaking who is asking the questions and i think one of the major major tasks even is to create our surroundings in which research questions could be rethink and re-evaluated and i think therefore the art has uh as in my experience and an amazing capacity because it's constantly re-asking all the conditions they are working in so it's institutional it's uh it's the practices and it's constantly might even change them which a big institution can't thank you stefan hilterhouse um i will come back to that by asking you for concrete example um concerning the evie t ha uh we'll see we'll see what your answer will be um so we would like um to wrap up this panel even though they're certainly more interesting points to discuss and we were thinking about having our panelists finishing certain sentences and i will start with you rihanna lechate imagine you were a student at your university what would you say about this debate i would say that uh well university i would say is the perfect place to learn more about yourself and who you are and not so much what you want to become and what kind of profession you want to enter in because the labor market is rapidly changing anyway so it's better to invest in learning about who you are and that is actually the best place i would say at a university and there you should also trust in serendipity i think that has been the magic word of this panel that's very difficult at the young age if you are a student you will only learn later in life maybe that you can rely on that so i hope that students who are watching will uh trust this older people panel that you you should really trust on serendipity and lastly for my for the staff i think let's or for everyone that's watching let's invest not only in one size fits all supermodels but in diverse role models because that is what i think we will we will need in universities as well thank you very much thank you i would like to follow up uh with george asking you to complete a sentence if you were a student again what we would be your main criteria to select the university well my main criterion would be whether i would get a chance to make a difference and not only a chance but also the freedom to make a difference and will i be challenged to make a difference and stephan hilterhouse imagine the evie te haachen invited you to design an artistic innovation practice of course money is no object what would you suggest doing i probably would start or maybe inspire people to think about a center a hub and i can integrate for advanced curiosity and we have to take this term serendipity and frictions and agara for sharing practices and knowledges a place in which you can encounter and the edge between university neighborhood and world questions a welcoming place with open access for creative social practical and intellectual gatherings where the questions come from all sides open to the city and its urban urgent needs a huge social space labs infrastructures for conference coffee and corporations wonderful thomas i think the serendipity will remain in our heads and the detour too if you were a student to design your own detour you would well i did design my own detour with uh you know being enrolled for 20 semesters until i got my ma so um i would really i mean this sounds like as if you're never going to get a job but hey come on as was said before you know you don't realize it when you're in it that this might be fantastic what what a university is an institution of learning building on centuries and millennia of what humankind can achieve on this planet not ugliness but beauty to delve right into it i'd probably give it even more of a try and to paraphrase nietzsche in one of his poems when he said in order to be a lightning you have to be a cloud for a very long time now everybody wants to be a lightning all the time but remember that your studies are the time of you being a cloud so stick around with being a cloud please and the lightning comes and it comes fast and it comes full of energy and that's your success later on and wolfgang am the one funding project we really need in order to foster innovation maybe in teaching but you can also think of something else at a university could look like what well it should combine two things it should allow to bring students their everyday experiences in and it should allow to show case scientific research as a continuously developing way to cope with the problems uh we are in and i think the combination of those those things would make a good teaching and you malta um if you had to tell your students um about this panel you know and um what your takeaways are would it be the cloud and the lightning one or what would it be well to be honest i'm overwhelmed by what i heard but um yes the cloud the lightning the the serendipity the detour is is really something that which remains me puzzled right now i mean if i look at my own cv it it looks like perfectly planned but there was a lot detouring and i actually followed my own ideas my values and and that was it that's why i made decisions to do something but at the very end you can tell a story totally different and this is something it remains me puzzled right now because i have to think about but i would love to think about how we can get that more to the students and i i don't want to say you all should do 20 semesters but i i would like to get this closer to them and maybe make them clouds yes and what about you anna yeah definitely functional serendipity i like that but i also want to stress what reina letchad said that you know we're talking about all these big nice ideas and you know it's it's beautiful and there's lightning and whatever but there are actually researchers and students out there who are struggling with the system and we really have to change certain things to make it a good place for them to develop and to become the lightning in the end so that was something that stuck to me um but yeah same as you a little bit puzzled i have to sort of sort things out and i'm happy about the panel thank you all yes thank you very much it's always what panels are looking for answers at the very end we remain with more questions at least that's for me um i love the discussion thanks for for zooming in and thanks also being on stage and i think we are going on with our next part in the program thank you very much thank you thank you [Music] [Music] um [Music] oh hello everybody a very warm welcome to all of you on behalf of the rwth aachen dear headmaster ulrich rudiger dear chancellor netikov the obviously very small live audience in the london federation nav in berlin the state representation of northrend australia in the capital berlin dear participants in front of the screens at home maybe you're just hiding from all day home family members in the study pretending a very important business or you're really looking forward to joining us on this very special occasion anyway we are really delighted and grateful that you joined us despite the dozens of zoom conferences per day and we hope indeed that we can offer you an interesting escape my name is prasanna uman i'm a moderator and communication consultant from cologne in northrend west failure first of all i have the honor to introduce two renowned keynote speakers which will be followed by the next panel discussion with the title university 4.0 teaching and learning in the era of the fourth revolution before we start with the first keynote please allow me a few words to contextualize the second part with the motto of this evening the new fiction of good science in need of a paradigm shift our top-class panel with four engaged and open-minded experts for future visions in the teaching universe wants to focus on people who are essentially important for the further development of good science and these are teachers and the students with our speakers we aim to cover a wide range of perspectives regarding teaching and learning and furthermore we want to look at the change process from an educational institution and innovation hub to a and now that's important society society-oriented establishment in the era of industry and university 4.0 what this exactly means we also look at it later on with all its challenges and demands but now let's welcome our first keynote speaker linda gratton linda is a professor of management practice at london business school i can see you already linda hi welcome great that you're here with us you direct the human resource strategy in a transforming company's program and this program is considered the world's leading program on human resources a central focus of her work is explorer exploring the changing patterns of work and their effects worldwide and providing unique insights into the movement of business from a competitive to a more collaborative workspace which i'm really looking forward to to listen to your words i'd like to share one quote of hers with you before i quote longevity and technology are having a profound impact on human life course and this inevitably calls for deep innovation in learning and education unquote so linda how are you i'm very good thank you very good it's a pity that we can't meet in person but still it's great that we can make use of this digital progressive progresses these days and i ask you all ladies and gentlemen just in the virtual space please welcome linda gratton and enjoy her keynote about the future of work linda the digital floor is yours thank you thank you so much well i have to say that i just realized that the very final thing i was going to do before we got locked down in 2020 was to come to berlin for this very speech so this was the first thing that was cancelled so we're now one year ahead uh and the world has changed but some aspects of the world haven't changed quite so much and what i'd like to talk about this evening is really why i think it's so crucial that education university education i teach at the london business school i teach mba students but why it's so crucial we have to change let me take a look at my first slide please now this is simply to remind you the two really important demographics are happening in the world today in general we're living longer uh my book the hundred year life made that pretty clear but also are having fewer children and when those two things combine what you get is an aging population and just to give you a sense of this right now 1 in 12 people this is global data 1 in 12 people are over the age of 65. don't worry i'm over the age of 65 and you can see it i'm still alive but by 2050 one in six that will be a one in six one in six people will be over the age of 65. that is for those of you who are interested in markets that's 450 million people alone in china so the first thing i want to say is are we really looking at the right demography why are we so focused on young people when we know that actually the majority of people in the world today are older than the age of 25 what do they need that's my first question second question and second slide please i want to talk a little bit about technology now i know that we have a wonderful speaker after me will speak more about that but just let me remind you of what's the impact that technology is having on how people work and how they live and and this what i wanted to just show here is that pretty much any routine task at work or indeed in your life has already been taken over by a machine or by artificial intelligence what's left is the non-routine test so non-routine tasks like manual tests like driving a truck or the analytical tasks forming a hypothesis thinking creatively understanding and so the second question that i want to ask is are we in or in universities thinking enough about what it is that humans do when technology is capable of doing so much for us what is that special thing that humans do and how might we go about ensuring that our universities really make the very most of the creativity and innovation of our students so what does this mean well you've heard earlier in the last panel about how we're living our lives differently and in the next slide you'll see that i'm thinking about it as a move from a three-stage life full-time education full-time work full-time retirement to a multi-stage life and this i think really gives us the key to what life-long learning could look like it says we cannot simply push all our education into one part of our life why well we're going to live to a hundred we're going to be working into our 70s uh and we want to explore right the way through our life so how do we do that how can we make learning part of our whole life particularly in view of technology which is continuously going to change the way that we work and change the skills that we need and let me just focus for a moment on these issues of skills that we might need as you can see in the next slide this is some work that we've been doing at the world economic forum on what sort of skills are going to be crucial for the future skills in other words tests and activities that machines can't do that machine learning or robotics can't do and what you see here is a huge focus on human skills social skills emotion intelligence being able to teach others content skills i talked quite a lot in one of my books called the shift on the importance of mastery and really understanding something deeply and potentially also having this sort of a of a way of thinking about um about yours about your specialism so that you have two specialisms by the way quite a lot of the companies that i'm working and advising taught to consulting services for example are saying we would love people with two disciplines because then that's where you get that creativity from so how do we really help people develop those crucial human skills those crucial skills like critical thinking like listening like creativity are we simply in our universities replicating frankly what a machine could do anyway i wanted just to nod to what's happening in covid because it seems to me certainly from my perspective at london business school that that's really fundamentally changed the way that we think about our life and i don't think that we're going to go back those of you who saw my uh my piece in harvard business review this month will know that i believe that hybrid work is here to stay so what are we learning from covert well as you can see from the next slide i think that we're really massive push on digitalization and i think we're being absolutely amazed at how well our technology platforms held up and uh you know i think even 10 years ago it will be interesting to hear from others about whether they agree with me but i think even 10 years ago we wouldn't have had the platforms the digital platforms that allowed us to do what we've done you know to talk to each other through zoom in such a low-cost way remember cost is really crucial with regard to education so i think we're going to you really think about how do we use those corporate platforms a great deal more how do we build platforms to learn i certainly know at london business school that we've been pushing uh against virtual teaching for years but i've launched a virtual teaching program it's been incredibly successful it gets great feedback it's a different experience but how do we really catalyze on those extraordinary opportunities that we've had i think the second thing that's really coming out of covert is that we're thinking also a bit more about our communities and neighborhoods and that also is a very important part of the education process how do we become more involved in our communities but let me finish by talking about something that seems to be a theme already for the conference and it's about networks and as you see in the next slide i just wanted to sort of remind us that when we think about networks in an educational way they they sort of have three types of networks and all of them are useful and crucial indeed for education the first is where you have these strong ties of people who know each each other well where they're exploring what they what they know and tacit knowledge is being exchanged that's why face-to-face is still so important but i also want to remind us that in terms of the learning and education process it's also those combinations where two groups of people who don't know each other very well but have real deep knowledge are able to come together my a great friend of mine runs the crick center down the road here in london which is one of the uh europe's largest research centers he's deliberately uh planned it so that this he has 2 000 researchers on site they actually sit in different discipline areas near each other so they get that marvelous you know combination but of course the third thing which you've just referred to is serendipity of course we're really worried that that's going to disappear during covert but certainly what we want is we want those unexpected moments when you just bump into people when you hear something you've never heard before and certainly when i'm designing programs at london business school that's very much the center of my thinking how do we design uh learning experiences that enable people to bump in to others in a way that they'd never have done before so thank you so much for asking me to join you and those are my thoughts for how education might really flourish in the coming decades thank you so much linda gratton for this inspiring and energizing keynote i must say i hope that we will pick up especially you you're addressing the crucial skills the so-called soft skills which they were known as before i think they are much more important so thank you very much and i will now ladies and gentlemen introduce you to the next keynote take care linda and see you hopefully again in the real world one day bye bye so the next keynote was pre-recorded in beaker due to time shift issues it's a keynote from professor anand agarwal anand agarwal is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at mit he was educated at the indian institute of technology in madras south india and holds a phd in electrical engineering from stanford university he is also a founder of ceo and ceo of edx a platform for free online courses from leading universities and institutions i also share a quote from him with you we have entered that's the quote we have entered a new frontier in higher education one where online is no longer second best this change was made most markedly by the rapid private to remote learning due to covet but it's here to stay and will continue to fuel the next 20 30 years of education and beyond now dear participants i wish you again inspiring 10 to 11 minutes for the keynote the new normal in education dear technical team please roll it pleasure to join you this evening to talk about the future of education and more particularly what will the new normal look like in a post-covet world for education one of the biggest inventions in education is the application of digital technology to learning creating online learning now before the pandemic there was very little online learning or digital enabled learning happening in the world around us but when the pandemic hit the whole world had to go to remote learning and because we had some of the tools available for online learning we were able to react somewhat reasonably certainly before covid and particularly after cohen online learning is the biggest revolution that is happening to education i like to see the world move in the direction where the future where the new normal incorporates much more of online learning into the classroom if you look at the green curve on the slide it shows an inverted pan curve of adoption of online learning so before the pandemic there was very little uh during the pandemic the base of the pan we went to near 100 remote learning and then as the pandemic eases and vaccines come out everybody will try to go back to normal but in the end it will settle out in what i call blended learning which is about 50 online 50 in person learning and that will be the new normal for education to me this incorporation this blending of digital learning into our educational system is the single biggest revolution happening in education in a long time this is a very good thing for society as digitally enabled learning can bring all kinds of new ways for people to learn and to increase access to education for everybody everywhere universities have been around for a long time and today digital learning can enable them to truly transform themselves and create new facilities for learners new ways for learners to think about learning new ways for universities to share content and one way we think about that is modular stackable learning so in the past you would go to one university and earn a full degree at that university but now with modular stackable education and this is particularly enabled by digital technology and digital learning we can think of dividing education into modular chunks into pieces one example of that is micro bachelors micro bachelors is a new kind of educational credential that that has been launched by my organization edx a micro bachelors is about one or two or three courses that you might take at a university and you don't have to get admission into a university you can simply take these programs online and then you also earn credits at the university when you complete it you have two pads once you complete it you've earned the micro bachelors and you can then straight away go on and start applying for internships or jobs and that certificate will help you and you can complete these certificates in about six months alternatively if you want to continue to a full bachelor's degree modular credentials like micro bachelors can be stacked up and you can accumulate the credits towards a full bachelor's degree so a micro bachelors is a modular credential that enables you to get value from it in a standalone sense as a standalone certificate or you can stack it up and earn a full degree in the future and i'll share some examples we have for example a micro bachelors in databases from new york university we have a micro bachelors in i.t management from western governors university so many of these universities are now offering these new classes of credentials that can truly revolutionize the life and learning for a learner and in fact imagine in the future uh these credentials and credits can be shared between universities where a learner can get the micro bachelors from nyu for example and then a second micro bachelors from western governors and can accumulate these credits towards a full bachelor's degree at some point where they are synthesizing a degree by sharing content and credentials from a number of universities to me i see this as a very important innovation in education not just in how we deliver content but that innovation and education having to do with credentialing how we make education more modular where people can learn and take a small piece of it and then accumulate it towards larger credentials even a full bachelor's degree giving a learner choice today on the other hand a learner a student would go to a university and they would have to complete the full bachelor's degree if they leave after one year they're called to drop out but with modular credentials like micro bachelors and so on they get a certificate if they just want a small piece of learning and this is a big step forward for education it is always fun to dream about what the future of university might look like but to me what's more important is the learner as we dream about the future of university it's more important even to think about what are the facilities for the learner what do learners benefit from such a university of the future so what i'd like to do is discuss some examples of real learners and their lives and how they are looking at education and see how this university this dream of mine this university of the future can help the learner achieve their goals so i show you five learners here let me start with uh maggie was a courier at postmates it's a delivery company and during the pandemic uh she was furloughed and she began to learn on edx and she completed a professional certificate from tomb uh from tomb in germany in six sigma and lean management he completed the certificate maggie has a job with amazon and she is now on a fast track for promotion and she credits the skills and techniques that she gained in this professional certificate program with fast tracking her and helping her on her job at amazon so maggie is one example of a learner that was looking to get a skill when the pandemic had impacted her life she was not looking to get a whole new degree she was looking to earn a skill and get a job and so in her case the professional certificate program is an example of modularity modular learning where a learner can learn a piece maybe spend six months learning earn a credential or a certificate and help them do better in the job or to find a job so that is one example of a learner so to me the future university must be able to cater to learners like maggie that don't want the full degree but want to learn a small amount to help them in their careers so that is one a second is what i call stackable credentials where today you have to do all your learnings from a single university imagine if we can share credentials and stack them up as we go through life and here i'll talk about three examples of learners amul bhave was a student in india he completed a certificate course in circuits on edx from mit and then he got admission into mit and continued his degree at mi another example is danika davika is based in canada she completed a micro masters program from mit in supply chain management and then she applied to mit got into the master's degree and the credits from the supply chain micromasters applied to her master's degree she completed a master's degree at mit and then went on and now she's an entrepreneur and has her own company so see how the stackability worked she completed the micromasters fully online and then she joined a university and completed a degree stackability courtney is another example who completed a micro bachelors in databases from nyu giving a lot of confidence that she could continue learning so these are three examples amol courtney and danika that benefited from stackable learning where at one part in the life they wanted to earn a certificate and then later on decided to do a full degree and the program the certificate the credits help them stack up and complete the full degree so that is second third is lifelong learning upskilling and re-skilling for lifelong learning and stefan is an example here he's from germany and he completed uh he'd already already had a bachelor's degree but he was working and he is signed up for the university of queensland master's degree in leadership and so he's working full-time and he's doing a degree a fully online degree a master's in leadership from the university of queensland and so that's another example of learning where our universities of the future should be able to help learners who may be working and who want to be learning at the same time and they don't have the time or the ability to go to a campus so in closing i see the university of the feast of the future as supporting learners who want modularity just one small certificate second that want to do online learning and then campus learning one certificate leads to another leads to a stackable degree and then third learners like stefan who are working who want to become lifelong learners and learn fully online without necessarily going to campus so to me the university of the future should support these kinds of learners that care about modularity stackability and lifelong learning thank you very much thank you very much anand agarwal for this catchy lecture with lots of practical input which we can definitely benefit from also from the other impulse in the forthcoming panel discussion where i get a whole load of professional support [Music] [Music] so welcome back dear audience thanks for staying tuned we also want to include you so before we start the panel i would like to address the time frame which we reserved for you just at the end of the panel for about 10 minutes we can also submit your questions so please follow the discussion concentrated and just place your questions in the chat please excuse us if we don't select every question but we try to do that and we'd love you to participate in the discussion and please accept also my apologies in advance for being a strict timekeeper since we have a very tight issue or schedule or issue this is why we also decided to dispense long introductions in favor of the discussion dynamics i now happily welcome my guest psycho there they are one is here next to me so first of all i happily welcome the vice chancellor of the university of leeds professor simon boyden dyke hi simon great that you're here hello then i'd like to greet the vice president of education and life long education at chalmers university of technology in gothenburg i hope i pronounced it right professor anna carlson bankston is it right champ no chambers chambers no chalmers gothenburg yes wonderful german l i also welcome andre andreas barna president of the shifter for band he was mentioned before in the welcoming speech the shift of event is a donor association which is a joint initiative of companies and foundations and last but not least i welcome right besides me on this floor with distance of course raphael hi hello everyone since rafael was able and allowed to join us in berlin i have some company in front of the camera i like that very much it's great to be here completely alone with the dj even seats like four before corona right yeah rafael is the head of the department at laboratory for machine tools and production engineering at rwth achen that's a very long title and a current phd candidate of the avitaha so now we have two main topics which we would like to discuss today first of all what is the university's role exactly meaning how can it deliver the greatest benefit for society we have heard quite a bit about it and stay relevant in the global context we address this questions of relevance in many political sectors these days second we want to discuss future tasks how do university or academia in its entirety have to reinvent themselves so that our society there the societies again is prepared for its complex tasks in the future so let's now start without further ado and i address simone with my first question simon we talked a lot in the preliminary talk it was really a moving a moving preliminary trick i must say we talked a lot about the pressing challenges regarding the change of mindsets at universities we also talked about the overdue processes we have to set in motion and you said we need a strategy which is focusing on post post-pandemic situation education it requires re-figuring our campus thinking about online delivery and you named and this is what i want to ask you now the core values the core mission of the university which are changing the world which we also find in your statement how must these core values be reflected in teaching and second it's a two-fold how can teachers and students work together to change the world it's a long one but you knew the questions so i hope you can yeah thank you our planet faces incredible challenges as we all know um the covet crisis of course is one of them but there is climate change there's so many global challenges and i believe that universities are probably the only networked institutions can help solve those challenges and we have no time to waste and if you look at the core core mission of universities i think there are three research education and societal impacts and for me the the second one is actually the most important and the most impactful because we should never forget we're training the next generation of global citizens and they need to change the world they need to help us rebuild some of what's been lost and they need to make sure that we don't continue on the path to pretty much self-destruction if we're not careful i don't want to sound too somber but i really think that's the truth and of course we need to teach our students with the great research we're doing make sure that they understand how to think evidence-based critical thinking skills all the the particular outcomes of our education that professor gretson was mentioning but i think the university that can actually focus on teaching the next generation in collaboration with others globally them is the one who will do most to change the world and and again we have absolutely no time to waste and your second part um how can teachers and students work together i think we need to think differently about teaching and we need to see it much more in an interactive way um not so much the the teachers you know telling the students these facts um that students then regurgitate in exams but it really needs to be about group work about interaction where students also bring their own selves and into the classroom where teachers can be the guide on the side instead of the all-knowing person on the stage and and and teach evidence-based each in a way that students can actually apply their knowledge to real life situations learn how to innovate how to make mistakes because they need to hit the ground running the moment they graduate we can't leave it to industry to ngos to governments to teach our graduates how the real world really works because there is no time to waste thank you so much simone i know rafael has to add a lot to this what the students can contribute but i want to first of all react to the first the what you answered the tasks of the people who are educating and this leads perfectly over to anna and i saw a presentation which you gave last year you were talking about responsibilities of universities and that's precisely what we are talking about today it's built on fundamental values simone was talking about it's actually about parenting which we come back later on so what are the long-term and short-term responsibilities that universities need to take on anna well i i think that one thing that i would like to lift up first is is add on a little bit to core responsibility and and i think that um one thing is to be a role model uh in society for for using the and this was actually uh brought up in the beginning today the uh using a scientific approach to uh to information and information bias that is that is one thing that i would really like to to bring up and always be grounded in history and scientific history when we teach our students and relate to uh what we know and not what we think and what we hypothesize and and that so so i would i would like to bring bring up that so i don't don't miss out on that but the short-term uh responsibilities that we uh that we need to think about the crisis-related responsibilities um well i mean we need to provide our present incoming students with high high quality education that's that's our foremost uh responsibility and uh referring a bit to what linda was was saying in her in her first talk was to find the path forward to a situation where we are adaptable and i i also believe that the hybrid education the hybrid situation is what we are going to be in but i don't really think that we are going to find ourselves in a uh situation where we will be uh adapting to a baseline hybrid situation because we will have to go back and forth probably uh we don't know what the what the world is going to bring to us so we will have to adapt again and again so a hybrid situation where we will be able to adapt to campus in digital for format of teaching i think is both a short term and a long term adaptation that is a responsibility we have to provide a good education for our students and then to also support the lifelong learning education for um for a lot of different types of settings and performance for for people that are seeking education now that that society is changing yes long term yeah sorry no no take that finish your sentence please and then no no no i wouldn't go on for a long time yes i know but say something about the long term because that's interesting i think that long term long-term responsibility is really to provide a long-term sustainable academic environment because as we also heard the academic or the the teaching environment the um providing of other types of education is going to be a fact and we will see a lot of different types of education possibilities and i think that the universities have a responsibility to also give the academic education as sustainable or the sustainable way of giving academic education for a long time ahead we need to preserve that in a way that is uh is sustainable so that's the long term thank you very much anna so you it gave us quite a bit of content to this this yeah inflationary used word of um flexibility and you also gave content to sustainability i hope we can come back to it later on but first of all i want to introduce my third guest with a question andreas barna you are a member of the high tech forum of germany last week you and your colleagues handed over the recommendations for a further development of the government's research and innovation strategy to the minister of education and research can you please briefly summarize the most important conclusions for the transformation and teaching in terms of curriculum and delivery thank you uh for the question there was no recommendation the high-tech forum made in regard to teaching i think i have to say this first the high-tech form worked on the question of innovation and worked on the question of how to be better and more open in regards to agile innovation how to change the culture in our world in our universities as well as also in companies how to do this such that in germany also more of the innovation out of universities out of uh other research institutions really finds its way into the into the real world of economic development and this has obviously and that's why your question is irrelevant about teaching has implications for teaching and we do need and i think that this without any question and i think it also was addressed earlier we need more qualification in data literacy this is absolutely important and it cannot be that china is the only country where a school book on artificial intelligence already exists none in in germany in many other european countries but we need more understanding of artificial intelligence the applications but also on the theory itself we need to have this ability of more entrepreneurial and transformational skills and i think that's not a strength in in germany but it's something we need and i think if it's not being brought to the students in universities where else should it be brought to them and therefore teaching is getting extremely important and we need to make sure that our curricula for example this question of digital uses in terms of data literacy take this up maybe specific for the question they are studying but ideally in a transdisciplinary fashion which allows them to also cooperate and work together with people who should be students from other disciplines thank you very much mr barna rafael is already nodding in next to me so where do we go from here i think you can you your statement which was um also in on the screen emphasizes your concern to carry out a critical reality check of the curriculum uh mr banner just mentioned yes i think uh there were a lot of very important things mentioning um data literacy i i can just uh i can just um underline this so when i look what my daily life is i'm i'm working on the so-called internet of production as the name says there is internet in it so there's a lot of data in it and then when i was studying i mean i'm not a freshman anymore but it's not so much of a time ago there was nothing about data in the curriculum and when i look 10 years back when i started studying how the curriculum for mechanical engineering looked there and how it looks today there's not so much of a difference and when we look how the society changed how the industry changed the needs changed to be done yes first steps were done and when we look for example at the master and bachelor thesis which can be carried out there is a lot about artificial intelligence about 5g for example but not in the curriculum and i think there i i fully agree that we have to deal with it and also find the right format to deal with it because ai is not about theory it's also about applying it so could you we were talking about methodology methods so which which competences are currently missing in engineering education i mean uh i think i think we heard it uh let that literacy was a word here um the whole point of digitalization was a word but i think it's also about the format i mean we have university 4.0 as a catchy headline for our for our panel here um and there were a lot of answers of what is what is university 4.0 and let's let's stick to the answer it's a hybrid format okay we heard a lot about digital hybrid and let's for now or i just say it right now let's say it's 50 50 and that's what will be the future and when we look now at the pandemic and at the formats we could see digitalization is possible it's not always good and it's sometimes actually really bad but it was possible and when i think five years back when i was chairman of the students council video of a lecture was already bayern munich it was like the champions league to take a video of your lecture and this fully changed i mean now we even know breakout rooms right so there was something happening and now we have to find the right fit the right format to bring the contents that are important with the hybrid format into real life okay thank you very much rafael um ana what conclusion would you draw from this previous speakers now the previous speakers you told me that you would like to see a head for teaching across disciplinary action to develop cross-disciplinary competencies in our students so what exactly does that mean why is it so important and what concrete competencies do staff and students have to to develop at the same time right i what what i just heard was not only about cross uh disciplinarity but also about the agility in um teaching and and uh learning and the possibility to combine your own uh track through education so that you can actually learn what you want to learn and to combine courses combine combine through disciplines combine your education and i think that that is something that we need to be able to do ahead to for students to uh to choose their own uh own track through education and and that's something that uh i would i would like to see and discuss more and that we try to to develop at our university um but when we talk about cross-disciplinarity i i think that it is really important for um since society is really a complex organism if you like uh that that puts a great demand on on our students to have competences uh to be able to work across different disciplines and and i mean as as you hear here the the students themselves is that they they understand that and they want that so we really need to design our education so that they have the possibility to to learn from each other to mix between different disciplines uh to try to to learn with students from other disciplines to mix with industry to learn within industry to learn within other um settings what teachers need to do oh sorry i can talk about this no no that's great i can just pick up something again because is it all only about industry is it only about the sector industry no no you would not say that no i mean if you look if you look at at the tech and medicine for example i mean there's so many examples in uh where uh ai meets neurology for example or where uh architecture meets rehabilitation uh i mean there are so many so many different examples where you would have different disciplines students that would gain from meeting students from other areas or teachers meeting teachers from other areas where we would have development of both education learning and and science yeah um i want to take simone in because she she is really she favors really the the inter continental transatlantic discourse but i want to or exchange but i first want to take rafael in because he was talking about the sectors and then simone i would like you to ask you about the exchange with the global south because there's there's one thing which is really important for me um and i think that that came a bit too less for today so we talked a lot about industry we talked about but we talked about also bringing impact for on on the social sector and this can be this i mean for example engineers can also have a social impact in the world it must not be industry but one other big social impact was completely missing today we talked about who wants to make which bachelor who wants to learn what but what did students really miss in the last year in the pandemic it was meeting other people we heard about meeting the neighbors having the exchange in the class and without being like rough to to to to lecturer but students are not only going to lecture because of of the lecture because teaching is always so great it can be but it's a lot about meeting other people and i think this social exchange is really important and digitalization cannot have this exchange on its own mr banner we have now talked a lot about competencies oh sorry sorry sorry simone sorry sorry i was just distracted so please excuse me no problem no because i really think it's important to talk about the collaboration with the global south because i think what universities need to do to tackle all the issues we're talking about is to collaborate much more to not be so inward looking not so focused on ourselves on our position in the rankings we need to collaborate as if our lives depend on on it because they actually do depend on it and we can't just collaborate in the global north we need to make sure that we're in a respectful mutual collaboration with colleagues in the global south because if you look at all the sustainable development goals all the global challenges they hit the global south so much harder we're seeing it in the covet crisis as well and we can't keep that colonial attitude where we know what the truth is and we send it to our colleagues in in developing countries we need to actually co-create education co-create research so we also bring some of that local knowledge back into our classrooms and our students can truly learn how to change the world not just in their own region but globally i also want to say something about how we can do that in response to what rafael was saying i think it's true that our young students who want to come to universities to grow up to learn and to just become working adults they love to meet up they love to have that physical connectivity with each other but there's a whole whole huge group of learners who are in jobs who have families who can't afford to come to a campus in germany or the uk and they actually prefer high quality online delivery and for me the potential of online delivery if we co-create it with networks of universities so it's truly knowledge that's globally relevant the potential is enormous because we can do it at a quality and a scale that's truly disruptive that's that was previously completely impossible and an online experience if it's built up from the ground not the emergency mode can be a really intimate learning experience where we can actually mimic and even improve our on-campus education you were even talking about decolonizing a curriculum in our preliminary talk perhaps you come back i mean having networked universities is to decolonize the curriculum because if you build it together it will be decolonized by definition thank you very much simone rafael wanted to just a brief reaction because i want you to go to mr it's just a brief reaction of course and i i miss this in my in my statement it's about it's about the stage where you're in but for me this part of coming together this just came too short today and this is why i wanted to mention it of course you're absolutely right thank you very much rafael mr banner i just addressed you before we have now talked a lot about competencies students should develop let's focus a little bit more hands on on the necessary changes in universities you're also remember of research summit roundtable and almost one year passed now since the last congress the next one will be in less than two weeks on the 19th of may which is aspects of higher education will be important this year did you see any links between universities and the public sector grow before i come to your question i briefly wanted to to try to signal that to you but it obviously didn't work uh to to comment or make a short comment on anna carlson's important point of the transdisciplinary work i think it would be extremely important that german universities learn from the anglo-saxon universities to to get projects done to get something also concretely done in teams and this also addresses the question how to meet people if a team tries to achieve something together i think they learn such a lot and this is not possible in the digital world that's why we need to come to the post-digital world again but this is so vital and if that is being done in a transdisciplinary fashion they learn more for their life than they would would probably or do probably learn in many of the of the courses they uh meticulously attend and and learn everything by heart that's that's one comment and then the other thing which i think we need to learn and has to do with simone's comment on the global sounds we need to do better in our german universities in terms of having the critical debate done when the in the anglo-saxon world you learn this how to critically debate certain topics and if you don't critically debate something then you are so streamlined and lose a lot of opportunities and you don't see the problems in the world because you are only focused on yourself and then again you learn only and only only learning so important it is it doesn't suffice universities have to be places for critical discussion so that having said that it's very close to my heart that's why i needed to say this um now to the research research summit uh round table uh what we are doing uh in in this research summit which is uh a regular uh meeting where the key people are in interested innovation from politics from uh the the from science and uh from society come together and the one of the main questions is how universities can contribute to the big transformation challenges in society new mobility concepts new energy concepts new concept for a circular economy and certainly also how our health system can be changed such that it can address for example in future even better questions like like the kovit pending pandemic and what is typical for these problems which i mentioned is that these are multi-stakeholder multi-discipline problems and therefore what we need to do in teaching practices in future and this is certainly a topic we are going to discuss there is how universities can help in getting better in transdisciplinary teaching and students better in getting this mindset of working in transdisciplinary content and there may be community-based teaching forms i won't go into detail there but this might be a possibility it was mentioned working together industry doing something practical in an environment doing some citizen science all this could be used much more openly much more broadly than it's currently done in in in universities uh not only speaking about the heritage which certainly has has a lot to offer there and final comment i would have liked to see a student for example in our panel or in in one of the other panels because these are the main trust of the university and if it celebrates its 15th anniversary and we don't get the opinion of a student in here who says you are doing things which are completely wrong or they say well you do a wonderful job it would be nice to have it stand here you are very right i agree we should talk with the people we are deciding about and not about them very true we tried it with rafael but we will take this suggestion definitely pretty advanced pretty advanced you're right but still i feel much older since he is standing next to me no but i wanted to pick up one um your first comment uh reacting to the impulses before raphael when we this comparison with other countries educational systems we face that we have been facing this for the past 20 years but does does this not address the question of connectivity in the whole educational system meaning shouldn't it start from kindergarten onwards that we that we really um have a kind of question our curriculum and also the connectivity between the different educational institutions we are already in the second topic do we have do universities have to reinvent themselves and i just changed it to does the educational system have to reinvent itself this is now a very german question sorry to both of you and then i take you again in anna and simon um yeah i mean it's it's a german it's a huge question um does the education of the system has to change yes and but to maybe bring an example what what i think is very important and where also university can profit that's ex especially the transition between when the abi tour is finished and when we go to university because we had the 12 years we had the 13 years then we had 12 years we figured out okay 12 years is not working and then now we're going back to 13 years but to be honest i think it's not about the 12 or the 13 years but when i look in my private life and my friends it's the time of the social service in between and i think when when this could be a first start with that we say we start with social service between the abi tour and the the the studies a lot could change and then we can bring people which might thought i'm becoming a mechanical engineer that they maybe become a nurse and the other way around so i think that's a point a starting point if somebody hears me who can decide this where we should maybe turn turn the lever ana you wanted to react too i saw it before are you still here she is she frozen is she frozen yeah now you're back okay because you wanted to react first are you back okay no she's not back i take her later and simone we were talking about parenting so i think this is the perfect moment to we have to look after our students you said we have to really we are educating them but we have to take full responsibility what is your suggestion ah now you're back i think i think parenting may not be parenting may not be the right verb totally because of course they're adults you need to treat them like partners and equals um so i i'm not sure that parenting is what we need to be doing i think the parallel with parenting is that we parents not because it's good for us as parents but we want to make sure that our children are able to be responsible adults to be fully productive in society and i think as universities we need to think a little bit more about what we want from our students and how we prepare them for the real world so we need to bring the real world into our universities but we also need to be much more aware of of being part of society and really making sure that students can hit the ground running so university is not like a box situation that has nothing to do with real life so in that sense we should parent like we want to parent our almost adult children and prepare them for real life this is was what we were heading to now i think anna is back yeah i'm sorry about that but i can hook on to that and and just say i think that we really need to to uh give our students a very broad skill set uh and and not to to it doesn't only have to do with with um uh giving them uh transdisciplinary teaching but also to to make sure to bring in all those different types of extra uh sets of knowledge like ethics and and theory of science and and history of science and and entrepreneurship was here before just to make sure that they actually do have all those other skills that make them become multifaceted human beings i think that's very very important to to make our students become well become become good human beings for society and for for themselves oh that's a great sentence thank you just to show a brief reaction because i promised the audience that i would take in their questions and we have some questions just a brief reaction to this and i fully agree um and i can there just we talked about the students uh um shout out to the universities that you support the student initiatives uh which which are there this can be in in the student council this this can be social initiatives engineering initiatives because i think exactly there students are learning this this has to be integrated in the curriculum that students are working in teams working on topics they like and working in interdisciplinary teams i think the answers are there we just have to integrate it in the curriculum so this is a perfectly transition to the question of one question of of the participants which formats would you like to see online and which would you like to see in personal settings who wants to answer or start because we we we now know we need also personal settings we need to interact with each other i mean i at least hope that medicines won't be online as a patient so that they at least teach on on the on the real bodies um yeah but i think of course it really depends i think bachelor studies probably will be more online than master studies and i think the the master courses are those um which can be smaller which are more in detail than where we need the the presence format there was a head shaking mr barna you wanted a controversy and you were shaking your head i i was i would be i would be shocked if a bachelor would only be working on a digital way to learn topics they need to discuss also they need in the small groups the interaction and the debate and that's why it would be absolutely disagreement what one can do in in terms of digital work that are the large classrooms that are the large lectures which are anyway going one too many but we need to have the formats where people debate discuss and interact in in real life and they need to understand how they how they burn something how they debate something how they can agree and can disagree that's something we didn't need for their life so without any question their digitalization wouldn't work simone yeah i respectfully disagree i think in the present digital environment there's so much possible that we could that we actually can do better with breakout rooms with life life awareness of the teacher what the students understand if you let them answer questions in a digital way you can see immediately what they get and what they don't get instead of waiting for exam results but of course there are lots of reasons why especially young people want to meet up so it's especially about the practicals about the labs about a course where you're working with patients those kind of situations we shouldn't even get close to trying to do that's online and everything in breakout rooms where you want to go and have a cup of coffee together and work on your homework but i think we need to start thinking differently about also the the students that we have because some people just don't want to be on campus and they can still be our students so thinking very very carefully about where we absolutely want to meet up together where we want to share a meal where we want to have that hands-on lab experience together where we want to mingle bump into each other and there's plenty of them because we've all been super miserable in the constant online mode in kovi i mean no one wants to go back to fully online once is gone but i think there's a lot possible in an online environment that can actually be better than what we're doing in our present classrooms but that's the key question what do we absolutely want to do physically and what can we do better online he agrees rafael he's standing next to me but no i i fully agree um this this will be the key challenge in teaching in the whole in the whole life because we have now one year of no time delays between any meeting and i think this will be a big challenge um i maybe set all bachelor digital a bit too fast but uh yeah i think that we should focus on smaller classes in in person and um this hybrid model will be the future but hybrid not online mr agarwal talked about networks so we need the analog for networking isn't it i mean anna do we need the analogue for networking yes i know i don't think that at all i i think that for some networking we need analog but not for all networking so uh but i would like to add to to simones uh i i think that was a very good description but i also think that there are some students that actually benefit from the digital so i think that there are some students who who uh learn better who feel better uh but those are not perhaps very many but i think we should also think about the accommodation of some students that that actually have a better situation with that so so uh to learn from what we are within right now and see see what we can do better uh i i think we are within a very steep learning curve and it's very difficult to say how to how to do but also one thing that we haven't been talking about is the mixed method so to say the situation where we have some students in class and some student at home at the same time that's also possible yes but we we mentioned it before but we we didn't discuss quite a few we haven't discussed quite a few uh points because we are already at the end absolutely already at the end it's always like that we have i have a long list and lots of paper here with questions but um i we had two other questions which we already answered that's why i didn't take them will we go back to full live classes um or in three to five years we don't think so i think that's uh it will be a mixed mix method setting but yeah must be and i that's why i didn't take it but i think we answered it within the discussion i would like to introduce now the last the final question because we are at the end of our panel so a final question to all of you for the rwth what do you wish the rwth for the next 150 years a very short wish or vision simone i start with you again to become even more meaningful than they are now on the global stage and to really help change the world thank you very much anna i would actually like to use the motto of our own university chalmers and the motto is actually in french uh i would like to lend that to archangel university as being a long and standing friend and collaborator so here it comes from chalmers to you for the next 150 years i won't say thank you very much anna mr bana what i do wish is that the the heritage continues to be placed for critical discussion thinking in alternatives and to continue to be outstanding in science and engineering also in medicine by the way and make sure that students have a chance to think act and learn transcription disciplinarily think act and learn transit disciplinary okay this is your last word my last words i i have three wishes but small ones so first of all in times of corona of course to stay healthy second a better train connection and the third thing is that the rwth will always be a place to be for those people which are willing to make an impact in the society so on the social on a teaching level as well as an industry and these people have to be on every stage so professors teaching staff also administration and of course students and i think if this is possible i'm looking forward to at least following it the next 60 to 70 years hopefully thank you so much thank you all for this engaged debate it was lively it was really interesting i would have loved to talk longer to you dear audience i hope you enjoyed this panel as much as i did thank you for your questions there's more to come so we have to leave the digital floor now stay tuned thank you for tuning in and listening and see you again goodbye take care [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] well the best things come last so to say but we had already so many great conversations and we would like to add in this third panel a different perspective as we heard just in the closing words normally the role of universities is seen to provide advice to really provide purpose to educate people but here in this panel we would like to take it upwards down to look a little bit on let's call it reverse innovation to take technology transfer the other way around to discuss what we can learn at the university from the private sector from startups from agile development from air enterprises from social companies ngos so we have five more wonderful discussions and panelists with us on a short introduction yeah we will definitely shed some light on these aspects and dig a little bit deeper into what is actually um the role of the university um and how can it evolve in the future and we will also discuss with our panelists how can education research business and the civil society actually work together a little bit better and what helps the university ecosystem or ecosystem to thrive is it partnerships with industry or is it maybe something else and importantly how can policy makers create a framework for such university ecosystems now um we actually even had two politicians to answer these questions however one of them is still in a car racing here and probably from the bundestag to be on time to mask we hope we can welcome in him at the end of our panel and uh katarina figure bank might be a little bit late but we hope um to be able to speak to her soon so don't be um surprised when both of them are not here immediately they'll catch up but for now let's introduce the smart minds who are here and those are the ones who have to to answer these tough questions [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] do [Music] well let's start with sabine sabina you are hopefully with us from your office at deutsche bahn and you're one of the colleagues we somehow admire well you were a professor at aachen and now you made it to deutsche bahn but it really i talked to you before and you said you learned so many new things so perhaps let's start with what are your personal experience you know from think from switching from being the director of one of the largest institutes at rwth aaron university really leading our research and applied artificial intelligence to industry what would you now perhaps to start with would do differently you know if you would go back to being a professor at rwth with the experience you gathered in your present job good evening frank good to be back well um start with the second question i would have told my students to to not consider themselves to be just you know to just have one role only at the time namely being a student safe or mechanical engineer i would well advise them to actively see yourself as a kind of a superposition of different roles you might be a student of a you might be a founder of b and you might be a member of an ngo organization or whatever and the same holds true for the professors so we should be much more active we should leave university for a while being a part-time or full-time industry leader go back to the university have non-executive board memberships or be members of a political party or whatever so being more fluent between the university and the outside world because if we did that then the result would automatically be if we come up with a new time of ecosystem much more open much much more transparent and multi-dimensional and this is i believe the case uh the ecosystem we really need for faster knowledge exchange and transfer in particular from the research into the industry and this is what we need for new top topics like quantum computing or 6g don't talk about 5g that's that's done i mean it's 6g now so yeah you have to come up with new innovative ecosystems in order to well once again be a technological leader in the new upcoming fields very good well thank you very much and i'm very pleased that uh katharine katarina figerbank is here with us today and welcome um so sabina yeshko was talking about building better ecosystems and how important that is now you're responsible for basically a big case study of an ecosystem which is um the city of hamburg so how do these ideas of building a good ecosystem especially when it comes to innovation and to research and science translate to the city of hamburg yeah first of all thank you very much for having me on this panel i'm very very pleased about that um i think um first of all you have to see that you managed to combine the different worlds the different uh ecosystems as you mentioned the economic world the society the political sphere and of course the universities and the system of science that is very important not to see them apart but really to bring them together and then to foster a climate of openness a climate that attracts people from all over the world to have unique selling points and what we did or what we are trying to do here in hamburg is really to use um science uh as an engine for city development we are right in the beginning of a really exciting process namely our science city hamburg bahramfeld where we already have huge unique uh infrastructures and facilities and we would like to create an ecosystem there that attracts companies and startups and of course create a space for living for people so you really use science um as an engine for city development so first of all uh foster a climate of openness foster a climate that that allows failure this is something i learned from my delegation trips to israel to to the uk to the united states that there is this spirit this mentality no fear to fail i i just try things and if it doesn't work i stand up and i try something different and i think this is something we need plus you need a strategy a clear idea of a vision uh in in how far science really um enhances and strengthens uh city development uh to see how benefit how how everyone can benefit from it and and and these are the three factors i think a clear strategy of innovation city development and campus development and an ecosystem that allows trailer in this is very open um maybe the fourth factor um to see where your strengths are where your unique selling points are and to strengthen them even more and at the same time um identify the the scientific the research basic research potential you have and bring it together uh with all the stakeholders that might might benefit from that those are two keys to to really reach an innovation innovative environment and maybe may i ask how does it concretely look like like is the university of hamburg part of it or are there also other universities or research institutions part of it um that you foster this climate um and and how is sort of the connection between universities in hamburg we have one big advantage in in hamburg we are a city state we are not only just the city within um eland you know germany is composed of 16 lender and and some of them are composed of many areas and districts and in cities and we have three city-states and hamburg is one of them so we have only short distances between our different universities and our research institutions and of course all the um stakeholders that are interested in in bringing them together and so we have at advisory boards when it comes to identifying our key research areas we have um boards that tell us look at this and that here is really a potential you should highlight and you should maybe connect with uh with some some players from the economic field of from the area of of the society and we have quite a broad approach to innovation it's not just um creating products it's how the whole society can benefit from it and uh i think this this really helps the different universities we have like we have a small university focusing on urban planning and architecture we have a relatively small technical university we have a huge university of hamburg we have uh um the university of arts uh and our university of applied sciences plus a broad range of uh um non-university research institutions and this is uh this is so rich our environment we have um and and we know that we have to catch up with other regions and other cities in germany and in europe but having having a a common idea and a common vision as the city government of hamburg state government of hamburg putting science first as a top agenda top agenda topic and and bringing it together with the field of economy with the fear of society of culture um really gives us a spirit uh that that shows any anything goes and and i think this is what we need in in these days especially um covet 19 it tells we might stop here because i think what you said was super helpful is that we need like short no no problem short ways uh we need like short ways and um like a sp and a broader idea of innovation so maybe um we yeah and i was just thinking um katarina when you and sabina was talking you were also talking about gunther's shoe it's good as probably one of these persons that fluently goes back and forward between different roles and brought us in the campus you know our kind of science park where more than 400 um companies are located now in ah and collaborating with the university so gunther i think um the previous speakers already covered a lot of um things that are in your heart in your passion so i just ask you what's your view on what we just heard what would you like to add it is all set so i totally agree now i would say our claim as you know as a university is learning to learn to research and to do i think sometimes they point on me when it's when it comes for to to to doing and i had the honor and the privilege that i was allowed which is normally in our governmental structure not allowed to be an entrepreneur and the ceo of a founded company or actually several of those that i founded together with my researchers so the doing means that we have to become more relevant and we learned in the previous sessions that teaching learning will be different i don't think that we need traditional lectures anymore i don't think that we need fallism that is the past what we should integrate is research and doing into learning so we can learn while we research we should combine research with doing and then we can do that with students much earlier so that is a couple of integrations that will be a new life and we should be that research and examination institution rather than the polyzones institution i had the chance to do that it is easier for a professor if you get that allowance we build our infrastructure with the campus to make that a bit more happen happening so we as the university of innovators i would call us i see us like this i understand if if all the others from other universities see that the same for us but i hope we are with the pacemaker at least with the campus the pitfall about that is what i what happened to me and a lot of other entrepreneurs who were let's say brave enough to go to go for deep tech innovations i tried to develop electrical cars from scratch i found it at least already the third of those and normally these systems deep tech innovations go away with investors from us from saudi arabia from china and then my heart i'm still a professor i'm a researcher i'm not doing that to give that away for investors somewhere abroad i'm not against these investors but i want to keep that as our ip as our gross potential and so that learning is very very intensive and i would say my teaching in classes not teaching traditionally more doing projects changed completely with that experience and so i would really recommend that our governmental rules allow a bit more what i was allowed to do as an exception to the rule very good and what i also hear is that in the end the engineering is learning about finance and management as a way how companies work in this and this is probably something we also should introduce earlier to our students beyond this deep tech and design but we'll probably come back on this as there also is a trajectory in how deep should we be but let's continue with our next speaker first yeah guintoshu said we have to become more relevant and he also gave a few ideas how to do that however why are we doing this where are we heading and this is why i would like to ask you caroline libernage what is actually relevant in the future what is the bigger picture of when we think about universities and innovation why yeah thank you for this interesting question and i think it's actually the key question so what is relevant for universities as as institutions as public institutions and katharina figerbank just said that successful city development needs a vision and i think universities do need that as well and it can be a broad one given the the diversity of university institutions but it could be for example something like helping society prosper in the long term so just being a support structure in a very in its very specific way for society um and we if we take this long-term perspective in mind we need to um we need to we need to show we need to look beyond universities as startup factories and also beyond the fact of universities as a warrant for employability because i mean we live in transformational times we have heard that a lot today already there is this huge transformational change of technology of new technologies there is uh the broad crises planetary crisis of climate of resources of biodiversity and we need to answer to all those new challenges and shifts and to do so we need a deeper systemic understanding we need new inventions and we need fundamentally different approaches um compared to what we are doing today and universities can play a very distinct role in this and what i would call a historic call for innovation but i think they should concentrate on what they do best if they do it so we also heard today something like um concentrate on their um institutional distinctiveness in a way and so disclaimer what comes now is an advertisement block because like many other speakers we have uh had before today um i'm a fan so in my my ideal type of of the multi-faculty research university it's just a unique cosmos of expert level discovery experimentation review and debate the disciplines allow us to deep dive into new understanding and because there are so many of them under one roof or like in a local spa in a local sphere we have this broad variety of perspectives that no other organization can provide and finally all this is kind of nested in one local space and at the same time virtually connected to international networks of peers so if you take back that's actually a pretty amazing set of strengths and it just needs to be put into good use um i like what professor carrie facer from bristol says about university she calls it anticipatory machines and this is because universities from their strengths have this unique ability to lean into and build understanding of futures and i think that's actually what we need from universities in this shift towards a transformational innovation because to build societies that prosper in in the long term we need to better understand futures that are sustainable and just and this is simply just because we don't know them yet and the curiosity of science can help us to get a better grip and develop new approaches and new interventions who take us there step by step but to do so and that's my last point is science needs to get a better grip as well um it needs to establish a stable and solid interface with society not directly serving its its short-term needs and not residing um separately in in disconnected ivory towers but but working alongside society with a cons with constant contact points to to source questions to debate findings um to transfer new insights and possibilities and this beyond campuses and conference rooms very good sabina i think you really liked caroline's comments at universities should be systems that anticipate both as someone really rooted in chironetics and machine learning so perhaps what's your take on it but actually i also wanted to ask you one question we got from the chat so all the previous um speakers some and you started with this that we should build ecosystems and some our ecosystems are the answer so perhaps could we anticipate ecosystems could we design these ecosystems at universities or what would be the way how those ecosystems emerge yeah i mean as some of the other speakers have already pointing out they are already emerging they have been emerging in athens they are about or they are on the way to emerge in hamburg so yes of course you can design them by bringing the different parties and the different stakeholders together personally i'm not so sure about the point uh one has mentioned that before one speaker that we should stick to you know our unique selling points because if i do that i have a tendency to always do the same stuff i had a very interesting experience i have been teaching the same entrepreneur class to chinese students and to german students in the last couple of weeks and i told them to come up with an idea for quantum computing startup the chinese students just did it the german students said they well i cannot do it because i have no clue about quantum computing but i mean the point of course is that uh if i investigate or if i if i'm the founder in a field where everybody or anybody knows about everything then it will be very very difficult to come up with a new business model so of course the trick is to be more self-confident and to kind of reach out for areas where you are not a specialist in because this is where the innovation is going to be made so um again coming back to the question of what i would teach differently or what would i kind of try to enhance is be more self-confident it doesn't matter that you don't know about a certain thing right now the question is are you capable to become kind of 80 specialist in this field as fast as possible and we did get some um questions from the audience and and they go actually quite well in line with my next question for uh katarina figerbank so the questions from the audience or one question from the audience is how do we actually begin to make this happen this vision this this positive future how can we make this happen on a broad scale and katharina figerbank maybe i add to that we're talking about universities as future hubs of innovation and doing all these great things but if we're realistic um often or in the experience of many researchers or students universities are or their structures are very conservative they're very bureaucratic so what could be ways to not leave innovation to you know the the outside the out of the box how can we leverage or help incentivize universities to actually go um this way um or or fulfill the vision we were talking about do we have an idea yeah i think first it's the people they have to have an idea of where they where they want to go and of course they need to have an idea with whom they can reach their goals that is very decisive if you don't have the people the different levels of leadership you won't get anywhere this is the first thing the second thing is definitely you need to create an environment like we as politicians city state of hamburg was very willing to create an environment to make it possible for our universities and especially the university of hamburg to go the path of excellence if we had sat together like five or ten years ago and you would have told me in 2019 2020 the university of hamburg is an excellent university and probably everyone would have said you're crazy this wouldn't happen so you really need to set yourself a goal and you need to work together like the state part the government plus the university and its environment i think this is very very decisive if you don't believe in one each other in one another you won't get you won't get anywhere and um if i can pick up what um what was said before uh that maybe it is not very inspiring to rely on your unique selling points i agree with you uh maybe you got me wrong because what i wanted to uh come across with is um that you develop a certain kind of self-confidence uh about what you're good at and if you're not aware of what you're good at um you won't get your strength anywhere and going that way that helps to see where other potentials arise somehow in that field of cooperation and this is exactly what we did and yes i do see that the governance in general in germany of our universities and the university system is still quite conservative but we just heard from professor what can be possible if if you step out of the box or if you step out of the system even if it is very difficult um and and i do see those developments that uh that the the um leading level of of the um universities really make an effort of becoming more open becoming more flexible talk about governance as a participatory project on the one hand but on the other hand have a clear structure of decision making maybe that doesn't work everywhere but i see that our university really managed in a fantastic process of getting everybody on board and gathering everybody behind that vision we want to go that path and we are very good and we want to become better and we want to do this not only for us but for for the city and for the environment uh we do studying and teaching and of course transfer activities by creating innovations and following that path that really helped also um to get everybody behind that behind that goal and of course to change the government's governance structures of it perhaps building on what we just heard and also caroline what you said earlier on let's call it purpose and the drive of a university gunter i think when this excellence initiative thing started we always was confident enough even 10 years ago to get it but what i now saw in the last very few years a very few months actually was a big trend that was all around and it just very recently i have to admit um you know what's catching up at achen university and this is sustainability and you and your colleagues at vidcl and many many others talk about the productions vendor you probably know the german term the production change shift we have to engage in and for me the question is is it another sentencing of an opportunity by winter shoe and colleagues we really have to catch on this bandwagon or is it something that we really truly believe this can really bring us on the next level you know on a higher ambition and perhaps really define the purpose for our university um frank i doubt that it needs special sensing or sentencing from myself of course we have the advantage with the size of our research institutes that we have so many projects in place research and innovation and development projects which we have more than 100 projects with leading tech firms in place so that you you get more of that urgency quite early in place however we are living all on the benefits of an industrial revolution which is production revolution industrialized production i'm a professor in production engineering so i should feel that and there are so many advantages about that but one thing is a huge disadvantage this development cost a a production system with over capacity and over production it's a necessity in that old system and the digital world the internet of production the lateral combination of the data of all these systems allows us to to change that radically that's a really change of a production paradigm and that means we can know what customers really want when they want it how they want it how we produce it and what we do afterwards and that means we can stop overproduction we can stop over capacity and that is the opportunity of the digital digitalized world in industry 4.0 and it comes with the sense of our young generation they want to do meaningful things far more than us when we were young i would say well now i try to do meaningful things however the young generation they want it from the very beginning and the capability we can we can use these data with artificial intelligence in converting our production systems that combines the urgent necessity to save the earth to protect the earth's mother earth with the digital com capabilities we have achieved and that is the big wave and it's not just energy shift energy transformation energy vendor it's not just mobility vendor it's production vendor it's the change of the industrial age and we can transport that we can contribute to that and we as a researcher we just should support that the young generations they just want it yeah as much as i as i really like these ideas um which are great and the vision is great and what you're saying is great when we're when we look at the status quo we have to say that especially in universities the leadership is still quite homogeneous um change is pretty hard especially in structures like universities and there's one question about failure culture do we really have failure culture in universities aside from research and science so i would like to ask you caroline zelbanagel how can universities maybe leverage change and innovation given the existing structures and given maybe the status quo so failure culture is uh is one one topic that comes up um all the time and it's it's an example for a whole set of things which are new competencies um uh that allow us to do our work differently and to can connect it better to others and my company succumbs why we we are advising and supporting um mainly public institutions in innovation processes and what we come across um on a very recent basis is that the key element for creating good innovation processes that actually serve a purpose is the ability to work together and um i don't mean people getting people in a room and signing a contract which is what we normally kind of do when we when we talk about cooperating i mean agreeing on shared goals combining strengths co-thinking co-creating and this on a day-to-day basis and i think we need that so looking towards innovation um i think we need that inside of more inside of academia across disciplines and also with experts from outside of academia so if you take a tangible example it would be let's say how to better care facilities or care treatment for dementia patients you will need experts academic experts from medicine from psych from psychology from care science there is but there is also a management point of view from the care facilities and you have nurses and um and there is a huge and right now if if science integrates nurses for example in a research design it's mostly as a research object so they are interviewees for example in a in a study but there is so much potential in inside like the shift as seeing them of experts on eye level that help co-design the research project in the first place and evaluate it as partners along the way and that's much more easy much easier said than done because there are different cultural norms at stakes different habits and it it rarely works to just throw a team of nurses in a in a scientific conference so it's just different backgrounds different languages and we need we need to start to actively create frameworks and processes that allow us to work together and we need to work on ourselves as well i mean we all have our deep dive special specialized knowledge and not so much habit to bring it into contact with somebody who is very different and has a very different set of experience and and expertise um this is also speaking of employability so collaboration is one of the future skills um uh that are oft named and i think um yeah working try and trans disciplinarities and with experts from outside of academia kind of builds the basis of actually like working on innovation that um that serves a broader goal thank you very much on that and i think what you said at the very end we could connect very nicely to something we got from the audience a question would you recognize a new einstein when he she is not a successful entrepreneur so perhaps sabina talking to you at other occasions i also know your passion for this deep tech you know and not just you know this wishy washy design thinking but really going deep so in your role let's say at cta cto at deutsche bahn really a leader with thousands of people working you know in many hierarchies beyond would you discover the einstein working at deutsche bahn or would you have discovered the einstein working in your lab at achen university well actually it was easier to find them in the deutsche ban because you know when i came there i had the idea of the dojo bonus perhaps everybody has like okay big company slow moving not very kind of exciting but what i faced is that there were so many people around which really tried to do to to make a change to the organization i went into a lot of what i would call for galia nesta you know what i mean for masterix where you really come up with people which have really totally different ideas on how we should run the trains in the future how should we program the timetables and so on and so forth so in the deutsche bank was kind of easy to find them because i mean it was it is it is it is encouraged to come up with really new ideas so i really like that from the beginning and we do have we have entrepreneur classes so we allow our own people to come up with new ideas we even fund them so if you want to be a founder go out of the deutsche bahn and come up with their own business we support them we support startups from inside having them in what we call for mindblocks which is an accelerator where they come to us they get pizza and they get coke and they come up with a product so this is more or less the idea and it works quite good and of course we also have a digital venture section which is also in my field where we invest in other companies so not so sure about einstein exactly but i would say that we are capable of finding the talents yes and this sounds like even better in a big organization you know that's normally we consider to be there for robustness and quality and safety and not so much in a university that's your take on that as anna you said earlier that universities are hierarchies and you know you have to be on gunter's level to be equitable for funding we can talk to mr rachel about this in a second what i found is that in the university people tend to stick to their roles so you're a student in a mechanical engineering whatever class and you take mass ab1 1 and 2 and you take construction technology 1 2 3 and so on and so forth and everybody does that and therefore and i mean i was teaching the two thousand pupil uh student classes so it's very very difficult if everybody behaves kind of you know as as the next one to find out which one is really really why it comes really up with ideas but in deutsche bahn everybody's working something different and some things are working quite nicely and other what strengths are working not so nicely and therefore it's much easier to to see the differences between the people i would say very good i think thomas rachel is almost there and we will definitely ask him another question we just wait for him but um we will also prepare um for the final round i think yeah we'll do this afterwards perhaps while thomas rachel is coming on stage gunther um a very quick comment on on what sabina yeshke just said on that role you know would you agree that in the universities we don't find these einsteins as easily as in your corporations you deal with i i would say we have about two to three dozen einsteins and that is just a relative perspective we have to invent so much more than in einstein times that i would say that is really the nice thing at the university and so i i never i never disagree with sabina but i would say we can invent as much as the deutsche ban perfect it's nice to have you here and um i would have started with an easy question you know what does your ministry what measures does your ministry take to foster innovation and so on but now at the end i think we go right in there and we were talking about you know how universities need to evolve how innovation um is an important part of a future vision sustainability working together um helping serendipity to to to come into place and to to work so when you think about the the current system um and what you're doing already with your ministry for fostering maybe um an ecosystem of universities so they can be more innovative they can thrive and do you think um the the measurements that we have or the measures that we have are enough or do you think we need some other standards or other ideas of what quality and excellence are well good evening everyone sorry for being late but parliament has priority um i would say well uh interesting ideas are always welcomed but beside this um i would say we have a quite an interesting system of um excellence um in in germany and uh without doubt the universities the universities are they have a special role in this they need free free room for basic research working after scientific questions what the scientists think is important and will be of value in next years and decades but also that we get it managed that the universities are open for working together with the industry with the economy side and so we have some measures for example we made the so-called excellence initiative an excellent strategy where we gave some hundred millions of euro in order to find out the best universities in germany uh to be in the top level internationally and as you know the avita is one of them and we are very proud of this as the north runways failing guy i may say this and this is one half the other half is we decided as ministry for uh science and research to make a so-called pact of innovation where we give support to the big science and research institutions for the next years years and years and plus of financing uh the next years and this also helps us that they can work together with the university is so only to give you an impression we will invest in the next years not in one parliamentarian period but over the next years till 2030 we will invest about 160 billion euros so this shows you the priority of politics of the german government for education for research for innovation and this not only for one two or three years but for a long time for 10 years now and i think this is really unique not only in europe but also in other countries so i think this gives us a really good chance to give up possibilities and opportunities for the best scientists the best teachers and for interested young girls and boys to get the best knowledge in our universities thank you very much for this jumping answer and maybe the quick and last round we i think we can do that and maybe um we have to be super brief but i think you can all do that i would like to start with sabina yeshka sabina yeshka if a fairy granted you one wish in regard to teaching at universities what would that be well i have three bushes you can only have one you can only have one well if it would be only one then i would very much like all students to have at least one year abroad having multi-national cultural experiences and not only in u.s or uk or australia which are english-speaking countries but we'll be having a year abroad in a kind of very very different culture with a different language because if you if you do that if you manage in a very foreign culture you get a lot of self-confidence you learn a lot about you know failure culture and that would really help our students to then be yeah less shy and more more self-confident in their next steps thank you catarina figure bank if you would look back 15 years from now into the future on something you started today what would you like to be proud of yeah not just in one sentence maybe in two or three one cent to have set the right course uh for a future worth living i would say perfect that's nice yeah and caroline zimmernagel what would be an inquiry from a university maybe the rvth regarding innovation that you would love to help realizing oh wow so we talked about projects that aim at futures that are sustainable and just and about um about collaboration and of course for me these two things should come together and i would i would love to um to link that to the academic institution so to to work with one specific university and see um uh what their unique transdisciplinary potential is uh into these futures and uh what the collaborative opportunities are in the regional setup around it with the regional innovation landscape partners and how all this can be brought to life on campus that would be just something i would love to do tomorrow you are starting a lot of new initiatives and in the course of this afternoon we talked about a lot of things that should be changed that can be done differently but what is the one thing you would keep that as it's really one of the strong pillars of our innovation and education system i'm sorry i think we should keep our differentiated education system which is accessible for everyone and this combined with high quality standards and teaching and finally across the whole sectors we have this would be the one sentence i propose and gunther shu if you had a wildcard question to one of the other panelists you can pick or maybe keynote speakers regarding education what would you ask well i would ask sabina because she's always a pacemaker and thought leader what really would and could replace a traditional lecture fallism is that ai based q a's and i i i'm afraid i don't get the answer now but i call her later to wait for the answer yeah and as i know sabina she will put it on her linkedin account within the next hour so to put some pressure on you so to close um ana what are the questions we didn't ask you would still would ask perhaps in a different debate oh my gosh there's so many i mean it's it's really about how to make it more concrete right how how can we actually start this and what can people in universities actually do within their scope of impact to get started but i think we will get there we will get there and um i have a mean question for you uh frank you have to tweet now what would be your tweet about the panel in what one tweet the panel in one tweet oh the age of the single einstein is over and being replaced by a connected interdisciplinary network you know of empowered students acting with purpose was this one not fought i think that was in in the character limit all right um thank you very much thank you so much for joining us um via zoom and and here um in in berlin um we had a yeah a good time it was fun talking to you and now the floor frank is yours thank you so much [Music] well there's a saying among innovation professors innovation happens when ideas have sex and i think this was exactly what happened here in these afternoons we've got a lot of ideas and i think we still have to work for long to combine this and really put it into actions we started with the emphasis by amin lashed and angela market on the importance of science the openness of society for science but also and i think this was a common thread through this program that also science has to be open to the needs of society and that this is a lifelong journey one of the striking elements also of over all we think was this idea of a community a university not of a hierarchy of professors an institute but a community of actors of people working together and also including these unobvious actors these people perhaps we don't see as a next einstein but these people that give us important um questions that help us to put our innovations into place and that should really that was one of the themes the second and this was very strongly in social media was this question so what is really the future of education is it a purely online or digital setting and most people agreed not we would like to have this physical space well i may say that the arrogance of a western society that really has access to education and wonderful physical spaces there are many many people around the world for those just digital spaces perhaps a very very great advantage but for our system probably we really saw that this will be one of the things that after covet will become one of the main priorities we have to ask us and as linda graton in her wonderful keynote told us most parts that can be automated by an algorithm most tasks will be automated already are so what's left for our students well for my management students i always say management coordination and organization these are tasks that actually the algorithm can do much better but leadership inspiring people coaching people giving purpose this is probably something where we as humans are much better in and this i think was another threat we saw in many of the panels that we really talked about what's the role of the university provide this purpose to act on that purpose and finally well there was another comment i would like to pick up from social media streams along this event it feels that somehow our visions from all the speakers from different universities are somehow very aligned that we have a common view about the future future well this is what i would take up taking up the comment by catharina fierbank but that if you all do the same are we all the similar well we should probably should all work together for a better future but with this i would hand over who definitely has to have the last word to our president or rector um so rector rudiger what would you say after all this what is our specific you know element of aachen university for the future good question very short answer i think provide the right room and don't lose human touch and now my final words so thanks professor pillar for your well wonderful final statement thanks to all speakers and thanks to all participants thanks for listening thanks for all your questions and comments that we have received in the query function of the event app and in the social media channels in case you want to comment on this evening or ask questions sometime later feel free to make use of all social media channels with the hashtag newssigns we will take up this input as part of our new online series the new fiction of good science talking about this new series will start in late summer with the first topic talking about innovation and sustainability we will keep you informed and we are very much looking forward to further exchange and discussions with you maybe next time in person or this would be wonderful i think this would make us all very happy for now take care stay healthy and remain confident goodbye [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

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Length: 212min 55sec (12775 seconds)

Published: Thu May 06 2021