Rolf Granow

Since 1997 I have been responsible for the E-Learning-activities in Lübeck, leading large-scale E-Learning-projects with a total volume of over 50 M$. The idea from the beginning was to use E-Learning to attract new target-groups of students by supporting life-long-learning and to use technology for innovative collaborations between universities. We currently use a blended learning approach with about 80% online-learning and with 20% of on-campus learning.

We started in 1998 with a consortium of German Universities named “Virtual University of Applied Sciences”. We have developed and successfully implemented complete online Bachelor/Master programmes in informatics, engineering and business administration. We have agreed to common curricula, we have jointly developed learning content, and we share the content and the LMS for all our online-students. We enrol regular students into the programmes at each of our universities, organise the virtual teaching and build virtual student-groups across the universities.

Following these ideas we initiated the European consortium named “Baltic Sea Virtual Campus” that today joins 12 universities from the Baltic Sea Area. I have been the chairman of the executive board since 2005. We have collaboratively developed and implemented international online-master-programmes in “Industrial Engineering” and “Transregional Management”. A specific focus has been the online-collaboration of international groups of students. They stay in their countries and form virtual groups. We have realized significant added value to the learning-outcomes of the students due to the multicultural and professional experiences of these virtual groups.

We started our engagement in Africa by cooperations with private universities and companies in Ethiopia in 2005. After completing the first pilotes in our blended learning scenarios we created pure online-courses with global students in 2007. The major part is coming from different African countries, but there are participants from all 5 continents benefiting from their different cultural and professional backgrounds.

I am currently the managing director of the limited company “oncampus GmbH”, delivering E-Learning-services and marketing online-courses and–programmes. We have a focus in developing high quality online-courses with rich media content and collaborative learning-scenarios. We have created our production-environment for efficient and sustainable course-creation based on professional processes and workflow-management. I am leading a team of nearly 35 people in Lübeck.

I received my Ph.D. in flexible manufacturing systems. For ten years I worked on the managing board of a German IT-company. I became a professor in Lübeck in 1993 where I taught production organisation and computer integrated manufacturing with a focus on re-engineering processes and the impact of IT on strategic competitiveness.