The use of digital research tools allows students to take part and provide feedback to the courses via a joint online platform.

Steinbeis Transfer Center IMCHI uses the Mediathread tool as digital research tool. Mediathread is an open-source platform for exploration, analysis, and organization of web-based multimedia content. The platform interoperates with a variety of image and video collections (such as YouTube, Flickr, library databases, and course libraries), and enables users to lift items out of these collections and into a scholarly analysis environment. The items can then be clipped, annotated, organized, and embedded into compositions and other written analysis.