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ScalingHESD

The Eberswalde Studienmodell: spiral competence development as the blueprint for curriculum design

The Eberswalde Studienmodell organises curricula around recurring competence lines that students revisit and deepen across their studies - now binding for all new programmes at HNEE.

The Eberswalde Studienmodell: spiral competence development as the blueprint for curriculum design
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This example is part of the Scaling HESD Innovations Series. In this series, we explore practices that already exist in the niches of Higher Education for Sustainable Development (HESD) and that could plausibly be scaled to the regime level of higher education. Each example describes the practice itself, the landscape pressures ( ⇓ ) it speaks to, the crack in regime practices ( ◊ ) it exposes, and pathways for scaling it ( ⇑ ).

The practice
Developed at the University for Sustainable Development Eberswalde (HNEE), the Eberswalde Studienmodell organises curriculum around learner-centred spiral progression and explicit competence development. Programmes are designed along recurring competence lines that students revisit and deepen across the course of study rather than as collections of modules accumulated for credits. The model now serves as the blueprint for the design of all new study programmes at HNEE.

The landscape pressures it speaks to
The model addresses two of the pressures identified in the workshop. Scepticism about higher education’s relevance ( ⇓ ) is countered by tying curriculum architecture to integrated, professionally meaningful competencies rather than to the modular accumulation of credit points the Bologna regime defaults to. And the AI-driven shift in what graduates need to bring with them ( ⇓ ) (e.g., reflective judgement, situated problem-solving, integration of knowledge across domains) is met by the journey-style curriculum, in which these capacities emerge through repeated, spiral engagement rather than through isolated module performance. The regime crack the model exposes is the dominance of modular assembly as the unquestioned standard ( ◊ ) for curriculum design on Bachelor and Master level.

From niche to regime
Three lines of work have lifted the model above the niche it started in.

  • Anchoring ( ⇑ ): after the original project phase the Studienmodell was written into the university’s Bildungsstrategie, making its key characteristics foundational and binding for new programme development, and recognised in accreditation procedures.
  • Coalition-building ( ⇑ ): the original application secured the highest external funding HNEE had ever received for teaching and learning development, underwriting a six-year change project and using the visibility of the funding as external pressure for internal alignment.
  • Aggregation across niches ( ⇑ ): the approach was jointly developed and codified with peer institutions in the working group “Sustainability at Brandenburg Universities”, culminating in a transferable practical guide (Molitor et al., 2024) that opens uptake at other Brandenburg universities and beyond.

References:
Molitor, H., Krah, J., Reimann, J., Bellina, L., Bruns, A., & Arbeitsgemeinschaft "Nachhaltigkeit an Brandenburger Hochschulen". (2024). Designing future-oriented curricula. A practical guide for the curricular integration of higher education for sustainable development. https://doi.org/10.57741/opus4-811

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The Scaling HESD Innovations collection is open — you are invited to contribute your own example.