About the faculty

The Faculty of Computer Science at Fachhochschule Dortmund sees itself as a supporter of social development, not only but especially with regard to digital change. As part of the Fachhochschule Dortmund, the faculty takes on various roles.

1. Leading educational service provider for practical training in the fields of computer science and digitalization in the city of Dortmund, in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region and in Westphalia
2. To enable a heterogeneous student body to study and obtain a degree that is valued on the job market, regardless of their life situation and general conditions
3. Networking the faculty with companies and authorities as well as within the university to establish itself as a competent contact for digitalization
4. Training of foreign students, integration of foreign teaching and research staff into the department and strong networking with foreign partners in the academic and business environment
5. Freedom for and support of research activities and industry collaborations
6. Open and respectful cooperation

Together with our students, we not only create knowledge, we also jointly create the ability to apply the knowledge we have acquired in order to generate added value in the respective practical context.

Not only do we train students locally in Dortmund with regionally anchored science and practical application, we also offer our students targeted preparation for a future career in a very international environment.

As they progress through their studies, our students also have more and more opportunities to take advantage of the attractive offers of our internationally oriented teaching modules, our international partner network and our international study programs.

While the basic training in computer science disciplines in our Bachelor's programmes is supplemented by a refresher course in English, attractive specialization courses are offered in English in later semesters. By offering courses taught by experts from our partner universities in European and non-European countries, we achieve a professional diversity and depth that is part of the attractiveness of studying at our faculty, but also results in an increase in value for our graduates on the job market.

This successful combination of a Faculty of Computer Science for the region with the opportunities of an international network is particularly evident in individual courses, such as excursion weeks with block courses in Kaunas, Lithuania, in Bilbao, Spain or in Kiev, Ukraine, and ultimately leads our students to the opportunity to take up a purely English-language Master's degree in Digital Transformation or Master's in Embedded Systems at our Faculty after successfully completing their Bachelor's degree.
However, the international character of the faculty is not only reflected in the programs offered to students. We are always in the privileged position of being able to attract visiting academics, guest lecturers and exchange students to our faculty, so that internationality and cultural diversity have also become established in our everyday life.

We are simply a faculty with regional roots but international ramifications.

At our faculty, digitalization is not just teaching content, but also an important part of ongoing faculty development. We do not see digitalization in teaching as competing with our face-to-face teaching, but rather as an opportunity to further develop face-to-face teaching using modern methods and techniques. With the help of digitalization, we can make our courses even more flexible in order to continue to successfully meet the increasing diversity of our student body. The ongoing digitalization of our society is a constant driver to expand our curriculum and our research focus to include digital transformation topics.

The implementation of projects plays a central role in modern working environments as well as in teaching and research. In this respect, it goes without saying that this topic also plays an important role in the teaching methodology of our faculty. On the one hand, this involves teaching students the basics of carrying out projects that cover several areas of computer science. On the other hand, it is also about supporting them in solving complex tasks in teams consisting of experts from different specialist areas. The aspect of using cultural differences between the participants in a project team to their advantage should also be taught as part of the course.

Students already have the opportunity to work on projects both in individual elective subjects and explicitly in their final theses. In this way, we not only promote the practical application of learning content, but also its joint application and linking across phases. Computer scientists in particular have the opportunity to learn how to work together in interdisciplinary teams, for example when a software project is realized from the initialization phase through to testing by end users. Furthermore, the project orientation is very well suited to transferring current research topics into teaching.

There are plans to continuously increase the proportion of project-oriented forms of teaching for Bachelor's and Master's study programs in both the compulsory and elective areas.

The faculty is very aware of its social responsibility and acts accordingly. On the one hand, social responsibility has its origins in the faculty's role as an organizational unit of Fachhochschule Dortmund and thus in the regional education system. On the other hand, computer science as a scientific discipline takes its responsibility for its social impact very seriously - especially in the age of digital transformation. Many Bachelor's study programs include "Computer Science & Society" as a compulsory subject, so that students come into contact with issues of social responsibility resulting from their career choice at an early stage. In numerous other subjects, current topics such as AI are also discussed in the context of morals, ethics and responsibility.

In order to live up to its responsibility as a major educational service provider in Computer Science, the Faculty of Computer Science actively networks with regional civil society. This is evident, for example, in its participation in events such as Girls' Day, DHT (Dortmunder Hochschultage) and the Dortmund Digital Week. Networking with the regional Business Studies sector takes place via our dual study programs as well as the joint study programs. The majority of final theses at the faculty are written in cooperation with companies, and guest lectures by industry representatives are a regular feature of many modules.

Approx. 3,400 students
Staff:
36 professors
3 teaching staff for special tasks
2 deputy professorships
60 members of staff

Lecture halls, seminar rooms and laboratories:
1 large lecture hall with 300 seats
3 lecture halls with 120 seats each
4 lecture halls with 50 seats each
4 large seminar rooms with 30 seats each
12 laboratories for the various study programs: computer science (practical and technical), business informatics, medical informatics and software and systems engineering dual