Enhancing the Digital Learning Experience: The Case of the Digital

Lab of the Berner Fachhochschule

Philipp Matter, Thomas Gees

, Marie Brechbühler Peskova, Benjamin Adriaensen,

Reinhard Riedl

and Adamantios Koumpis

Institute Digital Enabling, Berner Fachhochschule, Bern, Switzerland

Keywords: European Digital Competence Framework, Experimentation, Entrepreneurship, Digital Skills, Innovation.

Abstract: We present experiences from the establishment of the Digital Lab in our school as a means to help our students

build the digital skills and capacities to conceptualize, design, implement and lead digital transformation

projects. We conceived the Digital Lab as an internal soft-infrastructures building project at the Business

Department of the Berner Fachhochschule. In this respect we envisioned it as a place where interesting things

would take place and where people would bring their own ideas and have the opportunity to communicate or

share them with others. The application area relates to the acquisition of basic skills by the students to

understand the rules and the limits in sharing and trading data, acquire some sufficient level of familiarization

regarding how data privacy issues affect the partnership between companies, and how existing or newly

appearing business constellations can create value for data-based solutions.

1 INTRODUCTION AND

CONTEXT SETTING

Colicchio et. al. in a relatively recent research they

publish results of a study conducted on cloud

readiness (Colicchio, 2015). There, the idea is about

organisations and in particular small and medium-

sized enterprises (SMEs) to hire precisely those

services they need, and it is to this aim that cloud

computing enables them to overcome restrictions

from low budgets and limited resources. In the

present paper we shall elaborate on the

appropriateness of a Digital Lab as a means to

challenge and, hopefully, change the teaching and

education culture in the Business Faculty of the

Berner Fachhochschule.

Warren Buffett once said that ‘being successful at

almost anything means having a passion for it. If you

see somebody with even reasonable intelligence and

a terrific passion for what they do and who can get

people around them to march even when those people

can’t see over the top of the next hill. Things are going

to happen’ (Buffett, 2017). Our guiding principle for

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8183-2906

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https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2661-7749

the establishment of the Digital Lab in our school was

to help our students build the means for becoming

successful in the digitalization projects they would be

asked to conceptualize, design, implement and lead

once they will graduate from our school.

We are of course aware of the interest that is

attracted and constantly increasing in the last years

regarding the issue of digital skills and their

acquisition and possession by pupils, students, young

persons and at last everyone who is part of the active

workforce. To this, one may see the need to teach

students and young people in general as well as

potentially everyone ‘out there’ who is part of the

active workforce to get a starter’s or in some cases

more advanced level of capacities regarding Website

development, but is this really useful? Of course, one

may see the need for conveying some basic digital

skills regarding e.g. JavaScript Programming, or

interactive data visualizations. And again, the

question: is this really useful? Same can go for digital

skills related to databases and Web crawling, or data

analytics with use of Python, Jupyter, or Pandas.

Umberto Eco in one of his last works before his

death recognized that ‘losers, like autodidacts, always

Matter, P., Gees, T., Peskova, M., Adriaensen, B., Riedl, R. and Koumpis, A.

Enhancing the Digital Learning Experience: The Case of the Digital Lab of the Berner Fachhochschule.

DOI: 10.5220/0009427901710177

In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2020) - Volume 1, pages 171-177

ISBN: 978-989-758-417-6

171

know much more than winners. If you want to win,

you need to know just one thing and not to waste your

time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are

reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the

more things have gone wrong’ (Eco, 2015). Quite

paradoxically, this perspective, though seemingly

unexpected, is not in disagreement with an aphorism

of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who in his novel

‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre’ admits that ‘humans

are born to a limited situation, they can comprehend

aspirations that are simple, readily accessible and

precise, and they accustom themselves to using

means that are close at hand; but as soon as they

branch out from their restricted sphere, they know

neither what they would like to do nor what they

should do’ (Goethe, 1995).

The challenges and the open space of

opportunities and potentialities is a reality that all of

us but especially young(er) people are exposed to

nowadays, as result of the proliferation of digital

technologies. It is in this context that we see the need

for offering to our students the opportunity to acquire

those digital skills and organize their digital

intelligence in ways that will help them become

potential winners of the digital transformation

processes that have already started and will stay with

us in almost all aspects of the society and the

economy.

In the next section we present the background of

the EU Digital Competencies Framework (Vuorikari,

2016) and make a first attempt to explore its impact

and change potential for individuals as well as for

education and research institutions.

2 THE EUROPEAN DIGITAL

COMPETENCE FRAMEWORK

The European Digital Competence Framework, also

known as DigComp, offers a tool to improve citizen's

digital competence (Vuorikari, 2016). The original

reference conceptual model (appearing as DigComp

2.0) has been complemented by DigComp 2.1 that

constituted a further development that presented eight

proficiency levels and examples of how these can be

applied to the learning and employment field

(Carretero, 2017).

The core idea as also presented in the two

aforementioned sources is to identify a path of future-

relevant competence areas (dimension 1) and for

them also come up with an identification of the

competences that are relevant and important for each

of them (dimension 2), while for each of the identified

competences be able to identify proficiency levels

(dimension 3) and also skills examples that connect

back to each competence (dimension 4), as shown in

Figure 1 below.

Figure 1

The two-phase process to update the DigComp

Framework to version 2.0. Source: (Vuorikari, 2016)

Regarding the value from the use of the DigComp

Framework in a setting such as the Digital Lab, below

we list some indicative application concepts; there is

no doubt that practice may help us come up with

more, some of which may be totally unexpected or

unplanned and may have the potential for intensive

adoption and scale-up.

For the individual lecturers but also in a top-down

fashion at the institutional level DigComp can be used

to plan and help design teaching and training offers,

where the Digital Lab may help for building the

corresponding proofs of concept and prototypes; for

the educational policymakers it can help as a

reference for addressing digital skills and to support

curricula development.

The students themselves can also experiment with

the various modalities available so that they gain a

better understanding to a concept that had been

presented only in a theoretical fashion. Though not

tested at all, we might risk a hypothetical scenario

where students taking a macroeconomics course

would have the opportunity to simulate behaviours of

a market or an economy for various levels of

inflation.

3 THE DIGITAL LAB AT THE

BERNER FACHHOCHSCHULE

3.1 The Concept

We conceived the Digital Lab as an internal soft-

infrastructures building project at the Business

Department of the Berner Fachhochschule. In this

respect we envisioned it as a ‘place where interesting

things would take place and where people would

bring their own ideas and have the opportunity to

communicate or share them with others. As a place,

the Digital Lab should also offer the means for the

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conduct of workshops, allow people to co-work, as

well as carry out rapid and hands-on prototyping.

In this respect, our Digital Lab is not a novelty but

follows a trend that has like the SwissCom Digital

Lab, or the Digital Lab of a scheme of three

collaborating universities and three companies to

address, again in Switzerland, several areas including

amongst others different levels of prototyping and

‘applied digitalization’.

However, we have been aware of the many

childhood diseases that such projects may face:

enthusiasm is decreasing faster than one may have

expected once funding is halted, attention is not any

more attained, people who were involved are drifting

away and no new people seem to exhibit any interest

to get involved.

This is nothing new here, so from the early design

and conceptualization phase of our Digital Lab we

wanted it to be sustainable. Our idea was that if the

Digital Lab would be useful for our academic and

research staff and also for our students, there would

be no problem to even allow for a continuous re-

orientation process to run there. Or even better: we

could welcome this process as an essential means to

meet its ends.

In the beginning we had to cope with some myths,

which we briefly present and comment below.

Digital Does Not Mean Virtual: It is a common

mistake that people make, by identifying anything

digital as only relevant when addressing or engaging

a virtual space. This is quite wrong, and though we all

have experiences of digital banking that affects real

and no virtual financial assets e.g. when paying for a

good or a service, the latter being also not necessarily

virtual but real, we tend to associate digital with

virtual. The implication for our Digital Lab is that

people could be involved in any type of activities they

wanted and for which there was a part that addressed

the need for enabling digitalization of a process or of

an aspect.

The success of the above approach was foreseen

from our side but we never thought how big this

would be. Same as in the economy, that economic

slack is a term used to notify the resources in an

economy that are not used, our aim was to not leave

anyone out of what was happening or was about to

happen in the Digital Lab. So same as for an economy

economic slackness is measured by the amount of

equipment staying idle in factories or people who are

unemployed, our aim was to engage all academics

and students in the Digital Lab.

3.2 Improving the Teaching

Experience

For a University of Applied Science, where the major

focus has been traditionally been on teaching, the

Digital Lab offers a unique element for improving the

teaching experience and making a conscious and

deliberate effort to reach teaching excellence in the

form of situating the teaching subjects in a practice-

oriented and hands-on approach. As shown in the

Figure below, we designed it as a multi-purpose space

where a wide gamut of digital or non-digital activities

could take place.

Figure 2: How the Digital Lab looks like (sketch).

Amongst other things we planned to offer from

the Digital Lab was a special skills acquisition

program called “digital snacks”, which again is not a

novelty as there are similar offerings like special

acquaintance programs for helping people keep

abreast of new technology developments but our aim

was to be the first to introduce a novelty but on how

to make this an integral part of a digital skills

acquisition process.

There is a wide bibliography on digital skills see

for example in (Van Deursen, 2014) and (Broadband

Commission, 2017). There, amongst the trends

related to the promotion of the ‘digital literacy for

all’, the ‘teaching of computer programming and

coding skills to children and young people’, and the

‘facilitation of the development of digital skills

needed to enter ICT professions’ is included the need

to foster ‘soft’ and ‘complementary’ digital skills’ or

what the report calls ‘twenty-first century skills’.

The discussion on which ‘soft’, ‘complementary’ or

‘twenty-first century skills’ digital skills are essential

for future generations of knowledge workers or

employees or more fine-grained categories of

professionals may not be easy to structure. For the

needs of the present paper we shall limit ourselves to

only the first competence area of DigComp as

presented in the Figure below, related to information

and data literacy.

Enhancing the Digital Learning Experience: The Case of the Digital Lab of the Berner Fachhochschule

173

Figure 3: An excerpt from the first two dimensions of

DigComp regarding the information and data literacy.

Source: (Vuorikari, 2016).

As shown in the second column of the Figure

above, there are three basic competences related to

this area namely:

1. Browsing, searching and filtering data,

information and digital content

2. Evaluating data, information and digital

content

3. Managing data, information and digital

content

In (Vuorikari, 2016) where examples of use of the

digital competence framework are provided, it is not

by chance that all these three aforementioned

competences appear at the foundational level, their

complexity regarded as simple and on the cognitive

domain demanding only remembering, while other

tasks that are of intermediate, advanced or highly

specialized level, demand understanding

(intermediate), applying or evaluating (advanced),

and last but not least creating (highly specialized).

We regard this as a shortcoming as information

and data literacy forms a competence area that needs

to be covered at all four DigComp levels. And to this

we identified an opportunity for bringing this close to

our work at the Digital Lab, for helping people

acquire the relevant digital skills for this.

To use another term that has recently appeared in

the field, one may say that our aim is to help our

students build and further improve their Digital

Intelligence (DQ). This is an attempt to synthesize

many of the skills and abilities outlined above,

alongside notions of ‘digital emotional intelligence’

to produce a description of the cognitive, social and

emotional elements of contemporary digital

technology use (Yuhyun, 2019).

3.3 Making It Exciting: The Digital

Lab as a Hacking Zone (Bring

Your Own Idea)

In the city of Bern there is a very dense public

transportation network covering most urban areas and

with connections also to two other neighboring cities

(Biel and Solothurn).

Rami, a business informatics student has been

using the city transportation for almost two years and

hasn’t experienced any ticket controls. So for Rami

there was enough ground to believe that either the

transportation authority didn’t care at all if people

were paying a ticket, or there were some other means

to estimate the number of the fare evaders. He has

spent some time on how one may come up with an

estimate of the amount of the free riders and how one

may also achieve some level of confidence.

His girlfriend Namira works shifts in a fastfood

chain and once that Rami mentioned his thoughts on

the ‘Bern free riders’ problem’, she was surprised: for

her that she usually took the trains around noon time,

there were very frequent ticket controls. Sometimes

they were also unpleasantly frequent.

A consequence that we all experience as result of

the digitization is that people build opinions – either

on their own, or by relying on other people’s

opinions, or by use of a variety of means, and then get

locked-in to them. This doesn’t need to relate to big

issues like the climate change or the anti-vaccination

movement but may concern also very specific issues

like the example we mention above.

Our aim was to let students but also practitioners

from companies test their theories and set them to be

validated in practice. We encouraged Rami to get

access to data of the public transportation authorities

and build a basic repository of all data he considered

as relevant. These included the train and bus

connections, the frequencies of the routes and also the

geography of the routes. Then Rami build a parallel

graph that had all the control schedules. Using both

he was able to see if the controls were following any

specific patterns, e.g. giving emphasis to areas where

people with lower income or migrants were living or

for journeys that these high risk groups were used to

take. He was able to build all the necessary

visualisations as 3D maps. Apart from the executed

controls, Rami was also able to examine the incidents

that have taken place so that he would be now able to

examine possible causalities or correlations. Findings

like the number of free-riders increases on Mondays

and towards the end of the month may give us some

food for thought like:

• regarding Monday: financially weak(er) citizens

realise their precarious finances at the start of the

working week or alternatively after having

exhausted all their money reserves during the

weekend;

• regarding end of the month: financially weak(er)

citizens have consumed all their money reserves

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towards the end of the month, therefore they fare-

evade.

What is the difference from a student carrying out

the above investigation as part of the Digital Lab to

the conventional desk research? First of all it is the

hands-on approach: the student is not anymore

building theories in his head but tries to bring them

close to the reality. Secondly there is certainly a

design thinking approach in terms of building a wider

context that involves both gnoseological as well as

epistemological aspects. In the example above, he is

also cohabitating the Digital Lab with his girlfriend

that brings knowledge from her own experiences. The

idea is that students get used in building algorithms,

demystifying their power and building the path to

explain decision making as a sequence of human-

made syllogisms. Improvement or partiality can be

embedded within them, same as humans suffer from

bias-variance trade-off (Gigerenzer, 2009).

There is no objection that we need to prepare well-

educated and skilled professionals for the new digital

eras ahead of us, that will be capable to cope with all

the challenges related to the development of new

algorithms and approaches that improve the accuracy

of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

applications, and the creation of software services and

Apps that will have the capacity to tame the triptych

of density – immensity – complexity that appears in

most aspects of today's business fields. Below we

describe for each of these aspects the type of

innovations and research contributions that the

Digital Lab introduces and validate as part of its

operation:

 Density: While as practice shows convolutional

neural networks are designed for dense data,

there is a plethora of data that are often sparse

and which cause difficulties in their conversion

to a denser form. In the Digital Lab, we take

advantage of the computing capabilities offered

by edge AI to not interfere in the original pools

of the information, as a great part of the problems

caused by faulty operations are result of

inappropriate densification of the original data

sources. Same as in the literal ecosystems, data

lakes apart from the efficiencies they bring, also

create problems and cascading failures involving

also ethics and privacy aspects, that are difficult

to cope with in later phases.

 Immensity: Immensity of data considered as part

of typical Big Data analytics ‘ processing

routines’ as these appear in many real-world

applications in the areas of logistics,

telecommunications or smart cities applications

is not a problem at all for the computing

hardware. However, what we consider as a

comparative advantage with respect to other

approaches is the inherent support that the

Digital Lab philosophy offers for the support of

transparency - explainability - auditability of all

processing routines and algorithms conducted by

the students as users of the Digital Lab.

 Complexity: Use of computing hardware may not

reduce the complexity of all processing routines

and algorithms conducted by the students as

users of the digital Lab but shall help them better

understand the problems and issues at stake,

make sense out of them and also help, where

possible, tame the underlying complexity. More

specifically, for the aforementioned case of the

free-riders problem in the Bern transport

network, it might offer an incentive for the city

not only to increase the controls but to better

understand or earlier identify a social problem

that might help avoid future controversies or a

potential growing phenomenon related to social

segregation.

In the above context the Digital Lab may act as a

nursery for new ideas in a variety of fields other than

the economy and the technology, offering the means

for hands-on applied sociology and experimental and

behavioral economics.

We are all of us aware that AI Technologies are

data intensive, so in this respect data literacy is a

must. To this, the acquisition of some basic skills by

the students to understand the rules and the legal

limits in sharing and trading data, have some

familiarization regarding how data privacy issues

force, benefit or prevent the partnership between

companies, or how existing or newly appearing

business constellations can create value and trade

data-based solutions shall better prepare them in their

first steps of their professional career paths.

4 DISCUSSION

An aftermath we come up with regarding our

experiences and experimentation so far with the idea

of a Digital Lab as a core component for our teaching

and research activities at the Business School of the

Berner Fachhochschule is that one should not buy (or

respectively: sell) visions but invest on substance.

One should not care if what may have started as an

applied Artificial Intelligence project may have ended

up as a Big Data analytics endeavor. Same also if

one’s Big Data analytics project ends up in something

related to … Small Data. The important aspect is if it

makes sense.

Enhancing the Digital Learning Experience: The Case of the Digital Lab of the Berner Fachhochschule

175

Below we present some of our preliminary

findings which we aim to further explore and ground

on evidence from the field:

1. The Digital Lab should be designed for letting all

involved parties to enjoy learning through them.

If the digital transformation process appears or

becomes as a stressful imperative, all

incremental learning channels will be disabled.

We have seen this happening with the students

but also with members of the corporate

community. So it is a must to design your

digitalization projects in a way that there will be

little or even no stress-by-design or stress-by-

default.

2. Same as there are cool persons that don’t look

cool at all – in whichever way one defines and

understands coolness – there are cool and

exciting and above all useful digitalization

projects that make no use of Big Data or AI or

machine and deep learning.

3. Digital doesn’t mean necessarily virtual. One

can still keep things analog. And one may even

dare to bring back more analog experiences to the

people than there already are in the workplace.

This applies also for the students. Or as Yogi

Berra has been often quoted, ‘you can observe a

lot just by watching’ (Berra, 2009). A lot depends

on the quality of the team work and what one

understands from the value co-creation process

as such.

4. Excellence and quality matter in teaching and

research same much as to value the talents of the

students and the support one may offer to them

beyond the academic curriculum. For a Business

School like ourselves, this is our core business

and excellence is to be measured and judged not

from the relative success of the experimentation

that takes place within our Digital Lab, but from

the talents that we shall help our students build

or further improve and which shall be with them

for their entire professional lives.

5. One should design their digitalization project as

a journey to Ithaka. For companies especially

they may use them as a means to win their people

back, be them employees or customers or what

one may impersonally regard as an ‘installed

base’. One may also regard such a digitalization

project as a means to revisit one’s values or for

improving the emotional intelligence of their

organization. There are numerous examples of

companies shouting with whole page

advertisements that they care for our privacy and

for the security of our sensitive data, while

everything they do speaks for the opposite.

Sometimes a great part of the digital experience

is not related to Artificial Intelligence (or Big

Data or neural nets) and a mild dose of common

sense suffices.

5 CONCLUSIONS

Academic institutions as result of the competition we

face try to innovate in terms of services and offerings

to our students. At the Business School of the Berner

Fachhochschule we have designed and proceeded to

the establishment of a Digital Lab. In the paper we

presented apart from the core idea also its potential

value and utility this can bring to both the lecturers

and our students’ learning paths. To this we consider

a wide range of aspects related to teaching as a

practice but also as an experience.

The relevance we see to the European Digital

Competence Framework is extremely important as it

can potentially trigger a number of similar initiatives

which – independently on how these shall be named

e.g. Tinkerer’s labs, FabLabs, makerspaces, etc. –

they may all share as common denominator the

hands-on and experiential aspect and the freeing from

the frontal teaching.

An undisputed challenge that academic

institutions need to cope with is that they must take

into account the idiosyncracies of Generation Z and

offer them the best options to succeed in a socio-

economic context that seems to be continuously

changing. Our Digital Lab might, apart from its value

as a places to help acquisition of highly sought digital

skills, may offer valuable experiences for academic

teaching and learning at large.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are indebted to all our colleagues and the

Management of the Department Witrtschaft that

contributed to the successful deployment of our

Digital Lab as a collective effort and an asset to help

us foster a spirit of excellence in all our teaching and

research efforts for the years to come.

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