Homepage
Teaching
Stakeholders and News
"ICF! – Inclusion and Collaboration for the Future!": New self-study course for practical work

5. March 2026 | Faculty of Education, Education, School, and Behaviour, Research, Teaching

"ICF! – Inclusion and Collaboration for the Future!": New self-study course for practical work

Bringing together lecturers who want to work together on the further development of learning, teaching and assessment – that is the aim of the so-called "Cooperative Impulse Projects" that the eTeach Network Thuringia regularly supports. The aim of these projects is to encourage students to take a closer look at their own courses and the curriculum of a degree programme and to try out something new. "ICF! – Inclusion and Collaboration for the Future!" by Professor Sandra Neumann from the University of Erfurt and Professor Andreas Seidel from Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences is one such project. It was funded by the eTeach network in 2025 – the two have now presented the results.

The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF; WHO, 2001) is becoming increasingly important in educational, social, therapeutic and administrative contexts – at the same time, there has so far been a lack of practical, digital learning opportunities for its concrete application. This is precisely where the project "ICF! – Inclusion and Collaboration for the Future!" project with its self-study course. As part of this collaborative project, the researchers have developed a modular, multimedia self-learning concept for practical work with the ICF. The special feature: "ICF!" was designed in an interdisciplinary and participatory way – together with students from educational and health-related degree programmes as well as people with disabilities (incluencers) and their relatives.

The result:

a 100% free, digital self-learning programme on the ICF
practical, case-based modules with an authentic connection to the real world
transdisciplinary basic modules and specific advanced modules
diverse multimedia elements (videos, interviews, interactive scenarios)

The self-study course is available as Open Educational Resources (OER) under CC BY-SA 4.0 – freely usable, shareable and customisable. It comprises five basic modules, five advanced modules and twelve modules on case studies and thus enables flexible integration, e.g. in internal training courses, qualification measures, self-learning programmes, training and further education or to raise awareness among specialists in various fields of work.

The self-study course is now available online.

The intensive examination of accessibility in learning contextsand on the Internet had an additional learning effect for those involved in the project – both in terms of the choice of font and the colour and content design, visualisation, subtitling and linguistic preparation:

The font used Inclusive Sans font is based on the accessibility criteria for fonts. With Inclusive Sans for example, the letters d, b, q and p are not mirrored and there is a clear distinction between l, I and 1 as well as 0 and O. In addition, the spacing, heights and lengths of the letters are adjusted to achieve the best possible legibility.

Colours are barrier-free if they have the highest possible contrast ratio in combination with each other. For this reason, colours with the same luminosity were used that contrast with each other. For example, the font colour used (#3B3561) has a very good contrast of 11.24pt with the selected background colour (#FFFFF).

In terms of language, the project participants also followed the guidelines of the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs (https://www.bmas.de/DE/Soziales/Teilhabe-und-Inklusion/Leichte-Sprache-anwenden/leichte-sprache-anwenden.html). The project videos were subtitled throughout, the texts were written in easy language or translated using the tool wortliga (https://wortliga.de/texte-umschreiben/) to simplify the language. This should ensure that the content is as comprehensible and accessible as possible.