5G Learning Places OWL

Motivation

5G creates new challenges and opportunities for vocational education and training. Digital transformation is also changing the world of work and professions, and with it, vocational education and training. Many professions are changing fundamentally, some are even disappearing, others are emerging. In addition to IT skills, many non-technical skills (e.g. interdisciplinary thinking and acting, understanding systems and processes, self-organisation) will become more important. New digital forms offer new opportunities for personalised learning and access to education. This poses many challenges for teachers in vocational schools, school authorities and trainers in companies.

In Ostwestfalen-Lippe, the players in the education ecosystem are tackling these challenges together. The Leading-Edge Cluster OWL is researching the changes in requirements and skills profiles in tomorrow's world of work.

Objective

• Investigate application areas for 5G and develop learning scenarios for training in industrial-technical and commercial occupations. 
• Testing and comparative study of the learning scenarios in a 5G campus network and a 5G public network (including SWOT comparison with technology alternatives).
• Scientific, technical and didactic design and pilot implementation of distributed and networked learning offerings based on 5G technology
• Establishment of process and organisational innovations in educational institutions
• Sensitisation and qualification of teachers, trainers, skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled workers for the potential of 5G (or with 5G)
• Transfer of results and experience into broad application in OWL and NRW

The starting hypothesis of the project is that the 5G standard offers enormous potential for the future of vocational education and training in NRW. This is because it enables the powerful networking of different learning locations, with which practical and cooperative learning scenarios can be realised that address the future interfaces between different occupations and build bridges between educational courses and institutions.

The project "5G Learning Locations for the Education of the Future" will investigate these questions in the region of OstWestfalenLippe (OWL). From the perspective of 5G and education research, cross-occupational, cross-organisational and cross-location learning scenarios will be developed for the 5G-based production of the future. The focus will be on predictive maintenance, quality control and remote maintenance with mobile devices as areas of application where the potential of 5G for industry lies in high real-time data volumes and the use of multimedia content, and where the cooperation of industrial-technical and commercial professions at different locations and in different companies will gain in importance. These scenarios will be tested and evaluated in two vocational colleges with an Industry 4.0 learning factory in the district of Gütersloh in a campus network and in two vocational colleges with a mechanical engineering company in the district of Paderborn in a public network, in order to work out the strengths and weaknesses of both types of infrastructure in the application context of education.