Leuphana Digital School - explained

This is Anna. Anna is from Moscow. Ever since she left school, she has been working in various industries and has never really had the chance to deepen her knowledge or to take up an intellectual challenge. She misses learning and exchanging ideas with others.

 

This is Michael. Michael is an urban planner from San Francisco. Michael feels that - over the years - he has unlearned what made him feel unique and special: his creativity and his openness to new thoughts and ideas.

This is Leuphana Digital School. It was opened in October 2012 and bundles all the online education activities of Leuphana University in Lüneburg, Germany.

 

Its first course is “ThinkTank – Ideal City of the 21st Century”, which is headed by the renowned architect Daniel Libeskind and taught by a group of outstanding scholars and experts. Anybody who wants to participate in the course is free to do so – there are no preconditions.

 

In the online course, participants from all over the world form teams to plan and design their very own ideal city.

 

Throughout the course, they are provided with input via video lectures and online teaching materials. But what is most important is that together, all the teams form a global community, in which all participants profit from each other’s´ feedback and input.

 

After finding out about the course online, Anna and Michael decided to sign up. The two of them are matched with three other participants to form a team of 5.

After getting to know each other through the platform, they start on their first assignment.

 

Daniel Libeskind explains what the first assignment entails, and they start right away.

Ten days later, they hand in their first assignment for the peer review. Now, they receive feedback from other participants and different teams while giving feedback to others themselves. After weaving the feedback into their ideas and solutions, Anna, Michael and their team submit their work for review by Leuphana´s teaching staff.

 

Altogether, “ThinkTank – Ideal City of the 21st Century” consists of six assignments – each of them with a special task and topic. Each team´s goal is to design an ideal city and to give others the chance to experience it through visualization.

 

After successfully completing the course by submitting a visualization of their ideal city, Anna and Michael can obtain a University Certificate if they want to. To do so, they pay a nominal fee of € 20.

 

Anna and Michael finally find what they were missing. Anna broadens her mind again. Michael regains his creativity and his openness to new ideas by working in a global team, which also includes people outside his subject area who he´d never been able to exchange ideas and thoughts with before.

But that´s not all. A couple of days after their final submission, Anna and Michael receive a message from Daniel Libeskind. A jury of scholars at Leuphana Digital School find their ideas outstanding and they are presented with the award for the course´s winning team.

 

Their team is invited to Berlin, where they finally get to meet each other in person, and also meet the renowned architect Daniel Libeskind.

 

So, in the end, they have not only visualized their own ideal city, they have made some new friends.

 

Participation is free of charge.

Sign up by January 7th 2013!

Visit our website: digital.leuphana.com