Hybrid Learning: A Powerful Opportunity to Integrate SMEs in Courses as a Third Party

In typical teaching scenarios students and lecturers are involved. Nowadays, however, learning management systems (LMS) are used intensively to foster communication between students and lecturers and so reduce the need to meet in person in order to communicate. Additionally an increased involvement of practitioners and companies in teaching efforts at universities seems desirable for a variety of reasons. (1) Examples and comments from practitioners can augment teaching content. (2) Students can get in touch early and casually with potential future employers. (3) The lecturer might receive valuable feedback with respect to his/her teaching content and style and potentially more intense forms of co-operation might result. On the company side such co-operation might be especially appealing for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs), because large companies usually have other options, as well. Therefore, we set up a project using a university wide LMS as an enabling platform to escalate the involvement of SMEs and their employees in teaching efforts. In the present paper we report on the experiences derived from this project.