IEEE Education Society Member Spotlight

Full Name: Prof. Dr. Thomas Staubitz
Affiliation: German University of Digital Science
Location: Potsdam, Germany
Current Role: Head of Research Group Educational Technologies and Social Learning, Speaker of the Research Center Educational Technologies (both at the German University of Digital Science)

Website: https://german-uds.de/thomas-staubitz
 

How did you get involved with the IEEE Education Society?

I joined IEEE as a PhD student several years back. Computer Science, particularly programming education, is a topic I’ve been interested in since my bachelor’s and master's theses. For my PhD I worked on scalable e-learning solutions in the context of MOOCs. Through that work, I got in touch with IEEE and the Education Society. Actually, I published my first paper at the IEEE EDUCON Conference in Istanbul, more than ten years ago. Since then, I’ve been publishing papers on several EdSoc conferences, EDUCON, FIE, TALE, LWMOOCs/DEMOcon, etc. and also served as a reviewer for many of them. Since 2024, I’m a Senior Member of IEEE.

What are you currently working on?

Since 2024, I’m working at the German University of Digital Science, a very new, private, non-profit, accredited, and state approved online-only university. Our first cohort of students started in April 2025, the second one in October. We’re still small, but we’re building for scale. Next to my teaching and research tasks as a professor, I’m responsible for the setup and operation of our online learning eco-system, consisting of many connected and interacting components. Next to our study programs, we’re also offering free open online courses for everybody. Our new program starts in Jan. 2026: https://open.german-uds.de/courses

Why is engineering education important to you? 

Education is a strongly neglected but extremely important element of society and academia. Society doesn’t provide enough funding and in academia it’s often seen as the chore that prevents you from doing research. I love to combine both and add a proper dash of project-based learning on top. Particularly, in teaching programming, there are so many other skills involved that go beyond the knowledge of syntax and algorithms. They often used to be called soft skills. In my opinion, however, being able to work in a team is much harder than learning the “hard” facts of a programming language. Finally, the best way to learn things is to teach them, and I really do enjoy learning together with my students. I’ve been teaching in offline and online settings. While I sometimes do miss the direct contact to students, online teaching comes with so many advantages, e.g. in the diversity of the learners, or the flexibility, that I’ve learned to prefer it.

What has IEEE EdSoc meant to you?

One of the things I really enjoy in the more general EdSoc engineering education conferences is the wide range of the participants’ backgrounds. Meeting all those people from different countries and different fields of expertise is always inspiring.

Fun Fact

I used to play drums in a country, blues, garage jazz band if you dig deep on Youtube, you might find some old videos of Clark Nova Five. But beware, there’s at least two bands with a similar name.