The growing demand for teaching and learning environments (TLEs) entails increasing challenges for curriculum designers. The combination of learning content, didactic requirements and practical examples creates a highly complex construct of interdependencies, which needs to be taken into account when creating a TLE.

Chris Reich (SAP UCC Magdeburg; presenter) and Robert Häusler (VLBA Lab Magdeburg) investigate this topic and have presented their meta-concept “Teaching and Learning Universe” (TLU) as a possible solution at the SAP Academic User Group Meeting 2019. More than 200 professors and lecturers meet annually at this conference to present research results and exchange experiences with the didactic use of SAP technology.

The meta-concept is derived from already identified concepts and integrates previously isolated approaches, such as the IEEE standard for Learning Object Metadata (LOM). TLUs use metadata to classify and search as well as relate and maintain all learning elements within a given context. In return, this concept reduces redundancies when constructing TLEs with similar sets of TLU components.