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Silke Masson
Center for Quality Assurance and Development, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany
Silke Masson works as an educational developer and research associate at the Center for Quality Assurance and Development at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany (JGU).
Back in 2010, JGU established a continuing education programme called “Peer Coaching”, that not only promotes the improvement of individual teaching skills, but also aims to develop a new teaching culture and establish collective responsibility for the quality of teaching. For this reason, the established programme initiates and supports learning communities: Groups of eight to sixteen people work together for several semesters to collectively reflect on their teaching and develop their teaching skills. To structure the cooperation process, the programme offers various training formats and different types of support from experts in teaching and learning. A total of 23 groups have participated in the programme so far.
Continuing the idea of developing teaching in communities of teachers, JGU recently launched the “ModeLL-M” project, in which three communities of practice (CoP) are developing digitally enhanced teaching-learning formats. The supporting infrastructure includes, besides others, a communication platform and services of a project academy.
In the joint keynote we want to discuss with Silke how learning communities can be established in a higher education context, which formats prove appropriate for higher education teachers and which kind of support and service is needed.