Subject Guides
Building future skills together
How do students learn to use generative AI sensibly, to evaluate academic information critically, and to engage independently with a complex disciplinary topic, both conceptually and linguistically?
The Subject Guide project brings these skills together. In a collaboration between the Fachsprachenzentrum (Language Centre), the university library and the degree programme, students spend a semester building a digital guide to a research question they choose themselves. In the process they learn to work with growing independence: to document their learning and research process, to gather and evaluate academic sources, to build the vocabulary of their field, to reflect on their findings, and to communicate their topic in English. They also learn to decide which sources to trust and which questions to pursue.
Future Skills that work together
The project develops fundamental, transformative and digital future skills students need for their studies, professional lives and participation in society:
- Critical thinking
- Learning to Learn
- Sustainability competence
- Information literacy
- AI literacy
- Media literacy
Disciplinary language competence runs through every phase of the project. It is not an add-on: what students have understood becomes visible in the language they use. Anyone who has to restate a source in their own words, justify a claim and answer a lecturer’s follow-up question cannot hide behind technical vocabulary.
A partnership of equals
The project depends on close cooperation between three parts of the university:
- The Fachsprachenzentrum leads the course and supports students in both their disciplinary and their linguistic development.
- The library strengthens media, information and AI literacy.
- The professors in the degree programme give insight into the thinking of the discipline in the Fachgespräch, a one-to-one or small-group conversation about the student’s topic.
Pilot project in Bioprocess Engineering
The concept was first tested in summer semester 2026 in the Bachelor’s programme in Bioprocess Engineering. Thirteen students developed Subject Guides over the full semester.
Their topics ranged from tissue engineering and mRNA therapeutics through food biotechnology to bioenergy and process analytics. The conversations with lecturers from the degree programme proved especially valuable: around ten members of the teaching staff were available to meet students individually or in small groups. Students brought highly specialised topics that the lecturers do not themselves work on. That was precisely where the value lay. What the lecturers passed on was not knowledge of the topic itself, but the discipline’s way of thinking, that is, how problems are approached within the field.
Transferable across departments
The Subject Guide is not tied to any one discipline or topic. The concept can be used in a wide range of degree programmes and adapted to what each subject requires.
It offers a practical way to embed future skills as a lasting part of teaching and learning and to prepare students for a world of work in which academic judgement, competence with AI, communication in the language of the field and lifelong learning matter more and more.
Interested in working with us?
The concept can be tested and developed further together with other departments. We would be glad to talk about possible applications, ideas for cooperation and pilot projects.
Contact Language Centre and Library
