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“Weiter in Südbaden” Becomes südwissen

Did you know? For over 20 years, colleges and universities have been offering training in many different subjects. Nevertheless, the existing offers are still largely unknown to interested parties or companies.

The Project Start

Facilitating access to continuing education and making it more attractive is the goal of the University of Freiburg and Furtwangen University of Applied Sciences. As driving forces, they formulated the roadmap for this with the project proposal “Weiter in Südbaden”: A continuing education association is to be established in order to jointly market continuing education programmes, ensure quality, and promote cross-university offers.

Six other universities in the region supported the project proposal with a letter of intent. The Ministry of Science of the State of Baden-Württemberg and the European Social Fund of the European Union provide financial support for the project.

What We’ve Already Done

Two awards were presented for the development of cross-university continuing education programmes: The first Continuing Education Development Award (CEDA) in 2017 received a team from Furtwangen University, the University of Freiburg and the Thales Academy, who used the prize money to develop a continuing education programme in medical ethics. The second CEDA was awarded in 2018 to support the further development of the Catholic University’s academic continuing education programme in art therapy, which will advance the programme in cooperation with the Freiburg University of Education and the University Hospital.

Since the beginning of the project, “Weiter in Südbaden” has established a cross-university professional community on the topics of marketing and management in academic continuing education and offers regular workshops and seminars. Furthermore, the project team is building a digital professional community. Members will soon be able to acquire and exchange knowledge in a digital form, regardless of time and place.

Where We Stand Now

The visible heart of the group under the common umbrella südwissen is the online platform suedwissen.de, which presents all continuing educations offers clearly and provides bundled information.

This is also the starting point for advancing the digitalisation of continuing education at universities – not only in teaching and learning, but especially in continuing education management.

Where We Hope to Be Soon

In the future, the platform is to be supplemented by a customer relationship management system (CRM). The system, which the participating universities can use as an extended backend of the platform, will digitally map the most important processes of further education management and create a basis for targeted marketing.

Currently, the structures are being established and tested between the continuing education institutions of the HFU and the University of Freiburg. In the next step, further university partners will be added and grow together to form a network.

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