Josef Spillner,  Salman Ahmed Khatani, Tauseef Iqbal Khan, Younis Farid

IQRA University in Pakistan and Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Switzerland are cooperating on a twinned learning lab  environment called the Cyber-Physical Immersive Learning Spaces (CPILS). Each institution possesses one identical replica of the environment which consists of hardware equipment, updateable software and data for future skills and future literacy learning. The environment permits education planners and blended learning specialists to explore the realisation of hands-on courses in an economic and digitally souvereign setting. Such courses are increasingly demanded for delivering skills and competences on the intersection of digital technologies and societal issues. Among the pressing issues in both countries are disaster risk management, precision agriculture and mobility science, all of which require cyber-physical interactions in daily business, and hence appropriate dexterities by students as future workforce. With CPILS, new educational concepts for advancing competence-oriented teaching and learning can be explored and studied across roles (lecturers, students, lab technicians) and across campuses and borders. Some of the applications running on the learning lab have matured into university-wide production services, whereas others are still in an early research stage. The talk outlines the concept of CPILS and highlights some of the realised and planned future applications.