Innovation in education and teaching at Leuphana

With the commission to create a model university by the state of Lower Saxony in 2006 and the introduction of its Leuphana study model, which is unique in Germany, the university took the first step. Since then, its study model has stood for innovative teaching and learning formats with high quality standards that are continuously questioned and renewed.

• Leuphana College offers a bachelor's program with a major and minor, the interdisciplinary Leuphana Semester and complementary studies, and a first academic conference.
• Studies at the Graduate School serve to deepen and simultaneously build interdisciplinary competencies. Within the framework of the Doctoral Track, there is also the unique opportunity to combine Master's studies and doctoral studies.
• The Leuphana Professional School offers continuing education bachelor's and master's programs as well as certificates, and opens up avenues for continuing education and lifelong learning for working professionals.

Together with the five faculties, the three schools act as impulse generators and motors of innovation. Jointly, they have consistently pursued the path embarked upon with the reform and since then, with foresight and daring, have continued to develop new study programs that are unique within the German higher education landscape.

• One example of this is the major Studium Individual at the College: it offers students the freedom to design their own curriculum from modules of all Bachelor's programs. With its introduction in 2012, Leuphana became the first German university to join the Anglo-American tradition of liberal education, which places equal emphasis on the intellectual and personal education of students alongside specialized training.
• Law is one of the oldest courses of study. In 2022, Leuphana set out to fundamentally innovate legal education: In a model course of study that is unique in Germany and is supported by Leuphana Law School, it is offering students the opportunity for the first time to take both the state law examination and a master's degree in law.
• With its project "Transformation through Innovation and Cooperation in Communities" (TrICo), Leuphana is the only university in Lower Saxony to receive millions in funding from the federal-state program "Innovative University." The project aims to strengthen the research-based transfer of ideas, knowledge and technology with the help of four communities.

Leuphana not only wants to keep pace with the major transformations of our present, but also prepare its students for future developments. To this end, it is continuously expanding its range of courses to include innovative study programs and elements that teach skills for the future.

• In the digital transformation, the competent and critical handling of data is considered one of the key competencies of the 21st century. In 2015, Leuphana therefore introduced a master's program in Management and Data Science at the Graduate School.
• In addition, in order to prepare students from all disciplines for these new competence requirements, starting in 2018 it became one of the first German universities to anchor comprehensive interdisciplinary and interdisciplinary Data Literacy Education in the curriculum of its bachelor's programs. In addition to technical and methodological application knowledge, it teaches a critical and reflective approach to data.
• At the Faculty of Education, a center for regional teacher training was successfully established, which is responsible for the innovative training of approximately 16,000 teachers in northeastern Lower Saxony.

Innovation comes from dialog and cooperation: In cooperation with renowned international universities and with well-known partners from business, Leuphana has succeeded in establishing innovative study programs that are characterized by their internationality and practical relevance.

• Since 2012, there has been a very successful cooperation with the Big Four auditing companies to qualify the next generation of specialists in the master's degree program Auditing at the Professional School.
• From 2016 to 2020, Leuphana is leading the Strategic Erasmus+ Partnership CREATES as the coordinating institution. It included five other European universities (University of Freiburg, King's College London, Sciences Po Paris, Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, and Maastricht University) and aimed to support students and faculty in implementing co-creative learning.
• Leuphana is the only university in Germany to cooperate with the Goethe Institute and, since 2018, has been offering the Arts and Cultural Management master's program at the Professional School together with it.
• The master's program European Work and Organisational Psychology at the Graduate School has been offered jointly with the Universiteit Maastricht and the Universidad de Valencia since 2019, thus giving its students the opportunity to study at several locations abroad.

With its campus and especially with the central building designed by Daniel Libeskind, which opened in 2017, Leuphana is creating a unique place for learning and studying. It is actively shaping this place through dedicated campus development and by creating innovative teaching-learning spaces and learning architectures.

• Leuphana sees its campus as a living environment. In the course of the project of the same name, it has been developing it into a social and sustainable place of learning in a participatory process since 2016.
• In 2022, Leuphana was successful with its "Transformations::räume" project in the "Raumlabore" funding initiative of the Stifterverband and the Dieter Schwarz Stiftung. Since then, a team of Cooperation Service staff and academics has been working with students from numerous initiatives and transformation enthusiasts from all disciplines to develop an ensemble of teaching-learning spaces and student innovation spaces that focus on teaching future skills, creative exchange and networking opportunities.
• Innovative digital and hybrid teaching offerings require an innovative technical infrastructure. Leuphana has therefore equipped its seminar rooms with modern video conferencing systems throughout.

Leuphana attaches great importance to excellent quality in studying and teaching. It gives high priority to quality assurance and development and is also an innovation driver in this area.

• In 2011, Leuphana joined forces with the universities of Bamberg, Greifswald, Kaiserslautern, Kassel, Osnabrück, Potsdam and Saarland to form the Quality Audit network in order to promote quality development in studying and teaching with collegial, peer-supported procedures.
• The project "Leuphana... on the way!", funded by the "Quality Pact for Teaching" of the FederalMinistry of Education and Research, has established a cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional network for strategic quality management and for teaching development in two funding phases (2012-2021).
• Since 2014, the university has had an internal system accreditation procedure that enables it to independently review its study programs and award the seal of the German Accreditation Council (reaccreditation in 2021).
• In the Association of North German Universities, it is committed to bundling competencies in the area of quality assurance and development in studying and teaching, as well as to further developing the quality culture.

Lecturers, faculties and schools regularly successfully raise millions of euros in third-party funding for teaching development projects. The projects make an important contribution to strengthening the future orientation and innovative power of teaching at Leuphana.

• From the Foundation for Innovation in University Teaching, one collaborative project and five individual projects at Leuphana have received millions in funding since 2021. This underlines the high external recognition of the diverse teaching innovations at Leuphana.
• The Faculty of Education has been funded no less than three times as part of the "Quality Offensive Teacher Education" of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
• Leuphana has received several awards for its innovative concepts in teaching and teaching development, for example in the competition "Bologna - Future of Teaching" by the Mercator Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation (2010) or in the competition "Data Literacy Education" by the Stifterverband and the Heinz Nixdorf Foundation (2018).