Fostering students’ international collaboration experience with the FPGA Vision Open Online Course
12-02, 14:00–14:30 (Europe/Berlin), Workshop 1 (Turing), BBAW

A majority of engineering students doesn’t spend time abroad during their study program due to several reasons like necessity to work or care for relatives etc. The FPGA Vision Open Online Course enables students to get international collaboration experience from home without the need to travel. The course is open to all interested students worldwide under OER license to foster international collaboration and is integrated in our curriculum.


The FPGA Vision Open Online Course brings together two groups of students:

  1. Students worldwide with interest in FPGAs, signal processing and low-power design without a local lecturer in these topics.
  2. Electrical engineering students at our university. They participate to gain international experience at home.

So, the course provides the possibility for our students to get international collaboration experience and is a low-threshold-offer for students who do not go abroad for financial reasons, health limitations, or Covid19 constraints. Additionally, it offers a learning opportunity to international students, partly but not necessarily from partner universities.

While the course is integrated in our curriculum and is supported by lectures at our university, an eLearning infrastructure consisting of about 40 YouTube lessons, the FPGA Vision Remote Lab for practical exercises with real hardware, collaboration possibilities with our eLearning management system and regular online meetings is offered additionally. The eLearning infrastructure enables the international students to follow the course and provides several collaboration tools to connect our students and the international students. At the end of the course, participants will receive a certificate upon successful completion.

The presentation gives an insight in the FPGA Vision Open Online Course including the development of the course from its beginning in 2019 to now, lessons learnt and chances for the future.

See also: Presentation Slides

Andrea Schwandt is a research assistant at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University in the fields of digital and analog design. She has been a key developer of the FPGA Vision Remote Labs and is engaged in learning analytics for online learning. Since the summer term 2019 she organizes and instructs the FPGA Vision Open Online Course.

Marco Winzker is Vice President for Education at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University in Sankt Augustin, Germany. After studying electrical engineering and receiving his PhD from the University of Hannover, Germany he held engineering and management positions in industry. In 2004 he became professor at Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University, where he was associate dean of the engineering department and project manager of the university project in the German "Teaching Quality Pact".
Marco Winzker received the IEEE William E. Sayle Award for Achievement in Education in 2015 and an IEEE Educon Best Paper Award at Educon 2012.