Module Description

Non-technical Courses for Bachelors

Module Responsibility:

Dagmar Richter

Admission Requirements:

None

Recommended Previous Knowledge:

None

Educational Objectives:

Professional Competence

Theoretical Knowledge

The Non-technical Academic Programms (NTA)

imparts skills that, in view of the TUHH’s training profile, professional engineering studies require but are not able to cover fully. Self-reliance, self-management, collaboration and professional and personnel management competences. The department implements these training objectives in its teaching architecture, in its teaching and learning arrangements, in teaching areas and by means of teaching offerings in which students can qualify by opting for specific competences and a competence level at the Bachelor’s or Master’s level. The teaching offerings are pooled in two different catalogues for nontechnical complementary courses.

The Learning Architecture

consists of a cross-disciplinarily study offering. The centrally designed teaching offering ensures that courses in the nontechnical academic programms follow the specific profiling of TUHH degree courses.

The learning architecture demands and trains independent educational planning as regards the individual development of competences. It also provides orientation knowledge in the form of “profiles”

The subjects that can be studied in parallel throughout the student’s entire study program - if need be, it can be studied in one to two semesters. In view of the adaptation problems that individuals commonly face in their first semesters after making the transition from school to university and in order to encourage individually planned semesters abroad, there is no obligation to study these subjects in one or two specific semesters during the course of studies.

Teaching and Learning Arrangements

provide for students, separated into B.Sc. and M.Sc., to learn with and from each other across semesters. The challenge of dealing with interdisciplinarity and a variety of stages of learning in courses are part of the learning architecture and are deliberately encouraged in specific courses.

Fields of Teaching

are based on research findings from the academic disciplines cultural studies, social studies, arts, historical studies, migration studies, communication studies and sustainability research, and from engineering didactics. In addition, from the winter semester 2014/15 students on all Bachelor’s courses will have the opportunity to learn about business management and start-ups in a goal-oriented way.

The fields of teaching are augmented by soft skills offers and a foreign language offer. Here, the focus is on encouraging goal-oriented communication skills, e.g. the skills required by outgoing engineers in international and intercultural situations.

The Competence Level

of the courses offered in this area is different as regards the basic training objective in the Bachelor’s and Master’s fields. These differences are reflected in the practical examples used, in content topics that refer to different professional application contexts, and in the higher scientific and theoretical level of abstraction in the B.Sc.

This is also reflected in the different quality of soft skills, which relate to the different team positions and different group leadership functions of Bachelor’s and Master’s graduates in their future working life.

Specialized Competence (Knowledge)

Students can

• locate selected specialized areas with the relevant non-technical mother discipline,
• outline basic theories, categories, terminology, models, concepts or artistic techniques in the disciplines represented in the learning area,
• different specialist disciplines relate to their own discipline and differentiate it as well as make connections, 
• sketch the basic outlines of how scientific disciplines, paradigms, models, instruments, methods and forms of representation in the specialized sciences are subject to individual and socio-cultural interpretation and historicity,
• Can communicate in a foreign language in a manner appropriate to the subject.

Capabilities

Professional Competence (Skills)

In selected sub-areas students can

• apply basic methods of the said scientific disciplines,
• auestion a specific technical phenomena, models, theories from the viewpoint of another, aforementioned specialist discipline,
• to handle simple questions in aforementioned scientific disciplines in a sucsessful manner,
• justify their decisions on forms of organization and application in practical questions in contexts that go beyond the technical relationship to the subject.

Personal Competence

Social Competence

Personal Competences (Social Skills)

Students will be able

• to learn to collaborate in different manner,
• to present and analyze problems in the abovementioned fields in a partner or group situation in a manner appropriate to the addressees,
• to express themselves competently, in a culturally appropriate and gender-sensitive manner in the language of the country (as far as this study-focus would be chosen), 
• to explain nontechnical items to auditorium with technical background knowledge.

Autonomy

Personal Competences (Self-reliance)

Students are able in selected areas

• to reflect on their own profession and professionalism in the context of real-life fields of application
• to organize themselves and their own learning processes      
• to reflect and decide questions in front of a broad education background
• to communicate a nontechnical item in a competent way in writen form or verbaly
• to organize themselves as an entrepreneurial subject country (as far as this study-focus would be chosen)      

ECTS-Credit Points Module:

6 ECTS

Workload in Hours:

Independent Study Time: 96, Study Time in Lecture: 84

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Course: Academic Research and Writing (Seminar)