A look inside the digital university

Robot makes little men and sorts the pills

LH Stelzer and Founding President Lindstaedt with robot dog in the Robotics Lab.

(Bild: Peter C. Mayr)

A bumpy start, personnel debates, location problems: The new digital university in Linz has so far had a rather problematic image. The founding president now wants to counteract this - she gave an insight into the premises and presented what is actually taught and researched at IT:U.

The founding convention at the new digital university in Linz, which was still known as IDSA at the time, was already a source of controversy in early 2023: One member resigned, another lodged a supervisory complaint against founding president Stefanie Lindstaedt. Prior to this, the University Conference (uniko) had already strongly criticized the foundation - and most recently, the university, now called IT:U, hit the headlines because the City of Linz refused to reclassify the planned site near Johannes Kepler University (JKU).

In operation for a year
Despite this, IT:U began operations just over a year ago. Since then, teaching and research has been taking place in the interim premises rented by the JKU in the Science Park - something that has gone rather under the radar amidst all the background noise.

Eleven professors, 30 students
In order to counteract the impression that IT:U is a failing university, founding professor Lindstaedt gave media representatives an insight into the activities of the new university on Friday. Together with LH Thomas Stelzer (ÖVP) - the state is contributing to the construction costs of the future campus - she gave a tour of the premises where eleven founding professors, 85 employees and 20 doctoral students - another ten will be added by February - are "at work", as Stelzer put it.

There are no big basic lectures, says Lindstaedt, but rather project-based learning: right from the start, students are confronted with problems - designed by professors, companies or organizations - for which they are to develop solutions.

Medicine, disaster control, agriculture
In the various learning labs, which have names such as RITA, MOMO or HANS, virtual worlds are designed that can be used to simulate disaster control operations. Elsewhere, people's movements can be recorded and analyzed - in real time, a recorded person becomes a skeleton on the monitor, providing information for medical professionals. In the Robotics Lab, on the other hand, a robotic dog does manly things and a robotic arm sorts pills. Something like this could be helpful in the fields of care or agriculture.

According to Lindstaedt, the first Master's degree course will be launched in a year's time, and as far as the future location is concerned, next spring will be a "concretization phase". Until a dedicated campus is a reality, additional space will be rented near the JKU - from winter semester 2025, around 6,000 square meters in a building on Freistädter Straße, where Apple is currently still rented.