OpenBologna: a strategic instrument for integrating students in curriculum development

In the middle of 2010 the initiative ‘Bologna – Future of Teaching’ from the Stiftung Mercator and the VolkswagenStiftung in Germany funded degree programs and competence centres for different subjects after the role model of the UK subject centers. In order to tackle the challenges the Bologna Process has set for engineering sciences, three large and well-known German Universities of Technology (RWTH Aachen University, Ruhr-University Bochum and Technical University Dortmund) launched the Competence and Service Center for Teaching and Learning in Engineering Sciences TeachING-LearnING.EU. The embedded strategic instrument OpenBologna focuses on involving students in the improvement of teaching and learning. It is based on the concept of Open Innovation from the economic sector in which companies integrate customers actively in new product development. This paper illustrates the OpenBologna strategy and its benefit for curriculum development. First a presentation of the general aims of the Competence and Service Center TeachING-LearnING.EU is given. A short introduction to Open Innovation and into its success in the economic sector describes the foundation on which the new strategy is based on. A detailed description of the newly developed OpenBologna strategy follows. This includes the necessary methods but also a special marketing concept and strategic controlling. To give the reader an impression of the outcome of OpenBologna, the results of the first idea contest are presented and reflected regarding their use for curriculum development. In the end the paper gives a forecast of coming up actions and the research questions that lie behind them.