YOUniversity is an online participation project that aims to enable university students to have a say in the structure and topics of their university courses. For individual seminars it brings together lecturers and their students and enables them to discuss what subjects should be discussed and how learning in the seminars is organized.
Originally YOUniversity was created by a team of students. Since April 2016 the project has been funded by the eLearning support fund of the University of Düsseldorf. It is currently piloted in selected courses within the university.
Contact
Marco Wähner
Soziologie, Vorstand
Marco Wähner ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl für Soziologie II an der Heinrich-Heine-Universität und Kollegiat im NRW Forschungskolleg Online-Partizipation. Er studierte Germanistik und Politikwissenschaft (B.A.) und Sozialwissenschaften (M.A.) in Düsseldorf.
In seiner Masterarbeit untersuchte er internetspezifische Ressourcen als Prädiktor politischer (Online-)Partizipation. Zuvor arbeitete er als wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft (WHB) am DIID insbesondere am Projekt YOUniversity. Sein Forschungsinteresse liegt in der Bestimmung von Erfolgs- und Erklärungsfaktoren sowie der Wirkungsanalyse von Partizipationsverfahren auf kommunaler Ebene.
Contact
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Tobias Escher
Board, Computer Science, Political Science, Sociology
Tobias Escher leads a junior research group funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, focused on the effects of citizen participation on quality and legitimacy of political decisions regarding the transformation towards sustainable mobility, in particular on the local level. Previously he has managed both the Düsseldorf Institute for Internet and Democracy (DIID) and the PhD programme on local level online participation (NRW Forschungskolleg) of Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf. His research interests are the design and evaluation of participatory processes online and offline. His particular focus is the potential contribution of citizen participation for increasing the quality and legitimacy/acceptance of political decisions. He has also developed a course on the theory and practice of online participation, a result of which has been a platform allowing students to shape their course curricula.
Tobias Escher is a social scientist with a PhD in Information Science, Communication Studies and the Social Sciences from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. To asses the opportunities as well as the limitations of digital technologies he can also rely on his basic knowledge of Computer Science. Having previously worked and studied in Oxford, London, Leicester and Berlin, he joined Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf in 2011.