Lok-DiBB

Project lead
Prof. Dr. Thomas Freiling 

Project participants
Prof. Dr. Ralph Conrads
Prof. Dr. Matthias Kohl

Project staff
Astrid Saidi

Third-party funding provider
Federal Ministry of Research, Technolgy and Space
part of the funding programme "Digitalisierung in Bildungsbereichen – Grundsatzfragen und Gelingensbedingungen"(Digitalisation in fields of education - key questions and conditions for success)

Project duration
January 2019 – March 2022 

Coordinating institution
Forschungsinstitut Betriebliche Bildung (Research Institute for Vocational Education)

Project partners
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

Vocational education in Germany can take place in a variety of learning environments such as in a company, technical college or in an inter-company training centre (ÜBS). Cooperation between these learning environments is a legal matter and is laid out in § 2 BBiG of the German Vocational Training Act. It encourages the development of professional skills and ensures the quality of the training. Empirical results show, however, that the quality of such cooperations is below expectations: In more than half the cases, the learning environments either have no contact, are limited to organisational aspects or they only connect when there are problems to be solved.

The project aims to identify and evaluate the conditions for successful cooperation between learning locations for integrated degree programmes, especially in the field of digitalisation, and to develop a model for transferring findings into educational practice and making use of them there. The transfer model ensures it is possible to make specific, proven approaches as well as recommendations for implementation for successful cooperation between learning locations available to various institutions and players in vocational education by using digital media.

The project centres on two levels: On a content level, the focus lies in cooperation with regard to digitalisation as an object of education as well as learning content. On an organisational-communicative level, it is about using media as a technical (educational) instrument and communication platform.

The central research hypothesis is for the cooperation between the different players in three learning locations, the company, the college and the inter-company training centre, to gain in quality in terms of both content and organisational-communicative aspects through the use of digital media: This way, digitalisation contributes to improving the cooperation between learning locations. Existing cooperative networks in Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern will be examined so as to determine the status-quo.

The products of this project are – alongside the academic generation of knowledge and its publication and distribution (also at symposien) – a transfer model and an online-self-check. The products enable various institutions and players in career education to bring their own measures for cooperation between learning locations in line and evaluate. They will also contain proposals for suitable, practical approaches to intensify cooperation whilst taking digital media into account.

Recommendations for action for educational practice are summarised in guidelines for such, as well as being presented in the context of a symposium.