15. July 2019
The Campus Forum GmbH is the contact point for events and continuing education of all kinds on the RWTH Aachen Campus. The range of services offered by the Campus Forum is diverse and extends from conceptualization to realization. In this interview Dr. rer. soc. Nina Sauermann talks about the various possibilities for events on the RWTH Aachen Campus and introduces Campus Forum GmbH.

What exactly is the Campus Forum and what is its role on RWTH Aachen Campus?

Campus Forum is a service provider for further education, serving the clusters and centers on RWTH Aachen Campus. We offer support for the conception, marketing and implementation of further education events. These take many forms and can be anything from small, practice-oriented workshops to intensive training courses over several days and also large-scale events like conferences or trade fairs. In addition, we are also the direct contact for the industry, i.e. for companies, who wish to have their employees attend our further education offerings or who send them to RWTH Aachen Campus for guided tours and to experience this environment.

What does the collaboration between Campus Forum and the various centers and clusters on RWTH Aachen Campus actually look like?

Our further education offerings reflect the entire bandwidth of research topics of the centers on RWTH Aachen Campus. Specifically, that means: The centers provide the content for our training offerings. We act in a consulting role in terms of the didactic implementation and appropriate formats of these topics and we supervise external and internal communication, as well as the actual operative implementation on site.

In your view, what is the importance of further education, when virtually anything you want to know can be sourced digitally?

That’s true, there is hardly a question for which you can’t “google” an answer on the fly or search a database. But what good will a linear answer do you when the question deals with complex and continuously changing topics and issues? Digital knowledge and eLearning will always be helpful supplementary offerings. They will, however, never replace “doing”, i.e. learning from practical experience and first-hand witnessing or from exchanges with those in the know and the discourse and knowledge development with others not (yet) in the know.

What is so special about further education on RWTH Aachen Campus?

We can offer a learning environment here that optimally satisfies the complexity of learning requirements in organizations – i.e. the specific needs of our industry participants. Those that come to us, don’t just learn in accordance with the state-of-the-art principle – they become part of the evolutionary process of our research and development. As far as we are concerned, learning means participating in and experiencing of real life scenarios. We are fortunate to have all the infrastructure, test benches, prototype manufactures, labs and more right at our doorstep.

What added value do participants and visitors see in the Campus Forum offering?

We can offer a very broad topic portfolio due to the many research topics on RWTH Aachen Campus. Many are convinced by this to come to us for solutions with complex and holistic issues. And of course the infrastructure I mentioned earlier represents great value: After all, it makes a huge difference if I approach, for example, questions regarding the right procedure for production digitalization based on lectures or on a practical example, or if I can get directly involved in the implementation of smart shopfloor management in an operational company at the Demonstration Factory DFA.
More and more companies want to visit us in larger groups for customized workshops, guided tours or just to experience the amazing spirit on our RWTH Aachen Campus and to carry it back with them into their own companies. We are really happy about that.
Find out more about Campus Forum on the website.