Adaptation of a Research-based Teaching-Learning Format with Approaches of Online Learning in the STEM Field

Research-based learning (RBL) familiarizes students with the academic research process at an early stage and at the same time offers them the opportunity to actively shape their own learning process. Working on their own research problems allows students to go through the entire research cycle, which promotes not only subject and methodological competencies but also the students' self-competencies. The handling of subject-specific and didactic challenges of this form of teaching-learning has been discussed many times in the past. New challenges for research-based learning now arise from the shift of teaching and learning to virtual space associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper focuses on the adaptation of a research-based teaching-learning format to the demands of e-learning in the course Interaction Science with Artificial Intelligence. We evaluated the adapted teaching-learning format with 18 students in a master's program in STEM. The students stated an increase in professional competence in the areas of programming, data preparation and data visualization. Our results suggest that peer group and direct interaction via synchronous communication channels are important structural frameworks for research-based learning in an online learning context. From our results, we can derive initial implications for online-based RBL in the field of computational education.