This paper focuses on civic participation in higher education using the example of the collaborative project “Hamburg Open Online University” (HOOU). The leading question regarding the offered presentation will be: To what extent can Universities or Higher Education itself animate and encourage civic participation towards open educational proposals? The paper and leading question are based upon a media-pedagogical point of view that takes teaching and learning with digital media from a constructivist point of view into consideration. The central idea behind this perspective is the necessary change of the role-relationship between teacher and learner as well as the coherent changes towards teaching- and learning-culture and the idea of an open educational practice (OEP) (OPAL 2011) in Higher Education.

The term participation can be defined as a form of participation of individuals or groups in certain decisions or decision-making processes. Following this general understanding, participation concerns the relation of “players” as an individual or a group towards each other and the distribution of power between them in decision-making-processes (Arnstein, 1969). According to Urban (2005) the actual distribution of the power of decision-making only shows during a state of disagreement when certain processes have to be discussed and decisions have to be made. All in all one can say that participation is brought to life by the readiness of one part to take responsibility for decisions and respectively to give up the power of making decisions and by the readiness and competence of the other part to take the responsibility for decisions (Mayrberger & Linke 2014). The authors of this present paper will transfer those implications of participation into Higher Education and will focus especially on enabling civic participation for that matter. Therefore, the HOOU will be used as an example.

In January 2015 the Senate of Hamburg enacted a strategy towards a “digital city” to concentrate the process of digitalisation (Bürgerschaft der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg 2015). One example of its implementation is the “Hamburg Open Online University” (HOOU). This project is realised by all six public universities of Hamburg as well as the “Multimedia Kontor Hamburg” (MMKH). Participants in this joint (research) project are the University of Hamburg (UHH) along with the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE), the Hamburg University of Technology (TUHH), the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW), the University of Fine Arts (HFBK), the Hochschule für Musik und Theater (HfMT – University of Music and Theatre), and the HafenCity University (HCU). The cooperatively developed concept is going to merge the classical teaching proposals with the possibilities of digital technologies and the idea of open education. This strikes up to the Cape Town Open Education Declaration (2007) which remarks "open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues.”

The HOOU is supposed to provide the general public access to academic knowledge and scientific research. The overall goal in that matter is an active civic participation. Content should therefore be prepared learner-centered and problem-based so every interested person feels addressed. This problem-based approach can also be used to work interdisciplinarily and collaboratively, if the issue is so complex one person is not able to solve it on its own.

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