Summary
The postgraduate programme which is presented in this paper consists of an innovative design of lifelong learning for lecturers. The programme is based on the competencies a lecturer should acquire and in which the lessons learned are transferred to the classroom. At the same time, the programme is designed to help
lecturers in their promotion, which makes it attractive to potential participants as well as providing them with a tool for creating a network on engineering education innovation and research. The main reason for the success of the programme is that the lecturers find the training programme both challenging and useful
for their future careers, apart from being of great importance for society. They also benefit from the incentive of belonging to a network of colleagues who share the same interests, concerns and goals. Further research is required to detect the real impact this work is having on both students’ learning and performance and on the number of lecturers who are becoming increasingly involved in the engineering education innovation and research
field.

Relevance for Complex Systems Knowledge
Important is to provide the lecturers an attractive high quality training. But above all a type of training whose outcomes are transferred to the classroom and have a direct impact on students is relevant.
The six identified studying lecturers’ competencies are required by a university teacher:
• Interpersonal competence: know-how to help
students to develop critical thinking, motivation, confidence, and the recognition of diversity and individual needs. All this must be accomplished within a climate of empathy and ethical commitment, including ethics in professional practice as well as interaction with other individuals or groups.
• Methodological competence: knowledge of the modern methods and strategies of teaching and learning, and awareness of different learning models. Teachers must encourage and enhance learning as well as the development of personal and professional skills through the application of appropriate methodological strategies and evaluation, in accordance with the educational context and situation.
• Communicative competence: teachers should develop communication processes in an appropriate and efficient way, which means reception, performance, production and transmission of messages through various media channels in a contextualized teaching-learning situation. These channels include face-to-face interaction as well as written documents or new media such as videos, interactive tools and social media software.
• Planning and management competence: knowhow to design, guide and develop content; training and evaluation so that the results can be measured and suggestions for improvement be made; participation in interdisciplinary teams in a coordinated manner, in order to lead and/or assist in training and evaluation activities; generate new ideas and manage educational projects, with adaptation to new situations and needs depending on the available objectives and resources.
• Teamwork competence: this competence does not consist in teachers leading a group of students working together, but rather the ability of teachers to collaborate and participate as the members of a group. It concerns taking on responsibilities and commitments according to the common objectives, agreed procedures and consideration of the available resources.
• Innovation competence: know-how to create and apply new knowledge, perspectives, methodologies and resources in the different dimensions of teaching. A critical approach to one’s own beliefs and methods, the search for new activities, strategies and quality criteria, all with the aim of improving the quality of the teaching-learning process.

Point of Strength
The gained results of the postgraduate programme would be very interesting for the implementation of a more or less similar programme at DHBW. Especially the six methodologies are helpful in setting up special programmes around our so called living lab.

DOI
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Keywords
teacher training; professional competencies; teaching teachers; higher education teaching