Project 8 – Academic Writing (SWETLANA)

Scientific theses are a great challenge for universities. In line with their student numbers, they have to supervise hundreds, if not thousands, of theses every year. At the same time, students in the short bachelor’s degree programs often bring with them only insufficient prerequisites for the independent writing of scientific papers. Many only learn what scientific writing is when writing their theses. Seamless Learning offers solutions for this thanks to cross-context, scalable and flexible forms of learning. The research project further develops the online platform “Thesis Writer” – with reference to the Seamless Learning perspective. It transforms the traditional personnel-intensive guidance of theses into the digital domain and can reach a large number of students with an integrated, web-based platform. The instructors are thereby relieved of routine instructions and can thus respond more intensively to the content-related, methodological and technical questions of the students. The use of the Thesis Writer at various universities should provide information about acceptance, usability, integrability into study procedures and possible shortcomings. Based on the recorded interactions of the Thesis Writer, the project team also hopes to gain new insights for academic writing research and to close research gaps in interactive instruction systems. A comparable tool in the German-speaking world is not yet known.

Project partners: ZHAW, Universität Konstanz, Universität Liechtenstein, Prognosix AG, Universität St.Gallen
Project period: October 10, 2017 – December 31, 2019