Towards Perceiving Teaching As A Joint Task In An Individualized Teaching Qualification Program For Mid-Level Academics At A German University Of Technology

Empowering teachers for facilitating modern engineering education is essential. Thus, universities put much effort in qualifying teachers in didactic training programs. Especially individualized programs have been positively evaluated in the Covid-19- year 2020 by participated teachers. However, participants missed (informal) networking opportunities. Two questions arise: How do participants perceive their qualification program in the coming years? And second, how can we design a program that balances the participants’ thirst for an individual program compilation while establishing university-wide networking opportunities among teachers? This paper presents participants’ perceptions on a qualification program at a German University of Technology for the years 2021 – 2022. Also, it presents key practices of a revised program. After four groups completed their program, data was gathered through online questionnaires and descriptive analyses (48 responses of 106 participants). Also, four semi-structured interviews were conducted and content analysis was used as interpretation method. Results show that this qualification program is positively perceived in terms of acceptance, learning, future teaching activities and program characteristics. Specifically, participants define their training group as trustful, but only a part of them feel to share responsibility for teaching. Their personal teaching networks consists mainly of staff from the same school within the faculty and other mid-level academics. Interestingly, they encourage to tackle teaching challenges within the wider university community. Thus, both individual pathways and informal, cross-disciplinary opportunities for dialogue should be possible in a program that is flexible in terms of time and topics. Hence, qualification programs should be designed to address the challenges of contemporary higher education as a teaching community rather than as individual.