WiSo is an attractive institution for students, researchers, staff, and partners. Yet, value concepts and requirements of people have changed. To address those changes, we have implemented a variety of strategic initiatives.

Study Programme Content

We will include three focus topics in our study programmes: data analytics, sustainability and ethics, and entrepreneurship.

• Data Analytics. Digitalisation has changed how we live and work and has disruptive effects on organisations and industries. An important element of digitalisation is data analytics. Students must understand how data is collected, cleaned, stored, retrieved, and properly analysed with analytics software and how recommendations and decisions can be generated and we will include such elements in all study programmes.
• Sustainability and Ethics. We have already included Business Ethics as a mandatory class in our business bachelor programmes but not in other programmes and will address sustainability and ethical issues in the existing core classes of our programmes, for example by following a variant of the Giving Voice to Values approach prominently featured by PRME. This will be beneficial for students to fully comprehend the relevance of ethical issues and to understand the trade-offs that often occur when addressing them.
• Entrepreneurship. In order to foster an entrepreneurial culture and spirit at WiSo, we will create overall awareness for the importance of entrepreneurial thinking and acting. We will introduce entrepreneurship-related content into selected mandatory classes and offer specialisation courses with focus on entrepreneurship. We will also offer seminars in which students work on their own business idea and write their own business plan.

Study Approach

One of our key strengths is our research excellence. To allow students to fully benefit from this strength, we will adapt the learning concept and focus on an approach that teaches students to address and solve the new challenges that they will face.

• WiSo Teaching Approach. We will set up a task force that will develop a WiSo Teaching Approach. While we already have some initial ideas on how to improve teaching, a fully consistent framework is still missing. We will address even more real-world problems, connect theoretical concepts and methods more adequately with actual challenges of organisations and society than with our past approach.
  Our faculty is at the forefront of research. Students can benefit from the research excellence not only by learning state-of-the-art knowledge on current topics but also from research-oriented learning, i.e. by learning how to acquire and apply knowledge to solve problems that they have not been exposed to before. Implementing research-based teaching will allow us to better connect our research and teaching activities. Integrating students in academic research is another element of re-search-oriented teaching and we will provide students with the opportunity to connect with our researchers.

• Online Teaching. The discussion on how online teaching should be used is still ongoing and we will work on developing a coherent strategy in the next few years. Our current position is that online teaching or blended learning can be a good supplement for several of our courses and a substitute for very few. We consider a university not as a pure knowledge transfer institution since many of the values and competences that students must acquire require social interaction. Therefore, much of our teaching will remain offline but we will include online components wherever it is beneficial for achieving the study programmes’ objectives.

• Online Feedback. A prerequisite of a more interactive teaching approach that stimulates continuous learning is continuous feedback. A modern but efficient way to provide such feedback on an individual basis comes in the form of online self-assessment tools. For those classes for which it makes sense, providing problem sets and immediate feedback online can be a great means to improve learning. Students’ motivation can be increased if online learning and feedback elements are included. Beyond that, online learning tools can help students to organise their self-learning phases.

Internationalisation

We believe that an international and intercultural study experience is beneficial for our students and we will continue promoting international exchanges, allowing international students to study at WiSo by promoting courses and programmes taught in English.

• Diversity of faculty. Many of our faculty have degrees from abroad or spent substantial time abroad. We will foster hiring faculty with substantial international experiences. Besides internationalisation, we will increase diversity by hiring more female faculty, in particular on the full professor level.
• English-taught Bachelor Programmes. We currently do not offer bachelor programmes entirely in English, but offer most electives in English. We believe that we leave a large and attractive student segment unserved by WiSo and will offer an English-taught Bachelor in Management, Economics and Social Sciences to complement our programme portfolio and target this segment.
• Internationalisation in Master Programmes. Essentially all of our master programmes are taught in English and many students spend a semester abroad. Spending time abroad is well aligned with the objectives of many of our programmes and we make it the default procedure to spend the third or fourth semester abroad.