Suddenly, the course catalogue was a thing of the past and students no longer had to go to the Office to get seminar materials: How e-learning pioneers left the world of paper behind - and changed the campus of the University of Oldenburg.
Ten years ago, it was a buzzword that hardly anyone knew what to do with: "e-learning" sounded a bit like stuffy Data Centres and humourless HTML protocols. In reality, it was a small revolution. Except that it happened as quietly as the automatic update of an operating system.
It was the leap out of the paper world and into the virtual world; the point at which typical images disappeared from campus iconography. Like the student leafing through the course catalogue to find the room number of the seminar.
E-learning made the course catalogue obsolete: courses were now listed in "Stud.IP", a "learning management system" for students. Sending forms via internal mail was now too cumbersome - modules were entered in the "module descriptor" instead. Students no longer had to go to the Office to obtain materials that cost money. And the note in the seminar room announcing that the course was cancelled? Replaced by email.
Professors also had it easier: instead of creating, signing and submitting grade sheets to the Examinations Office, they sent students an email. It was a crash course in saving time that people took part in without even realising it - that's how silently the changes became part of everyday life at Oldenburg University.
Prof Dr H.-Jürgen Appelrath is one person who played a major role in this. From 2002 to 2009, he was Chair of the Lower Saxony funding project "E-Learning Academic Network". He also took the initiative in supporting "epolos", a pilot project with which the universities of Oldenburg and Osnabrück jointly left paper-based teaching behind. The initiatives were preceded by a declaration of intent from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in 2000 to promote the use of new media at German universities more strongly in future.
"Between 2002 and 2009, numerous innovative projects were supported," recalls Appelrath. The objectives were clear at the time: "Attractive teaching material, innovative tools for e-learning and new structures for the use of multimedia, new media and virtual events". That sounds like a precisely defined project planning, but there was no fixed dramaturgy for the innovations at the time, says Appelrath. The preparatory work and interests in the subjects and among individual teachers were far too different for that.
It was a phase of trial and error. Students and lecturers still benefit from the results today - usually without realising it. All the more reason to remember the days when the course catalogue was part of every student's backpack. Until e-learning pioneers made things easier, which today are as commonplace as the zebra crossing on Uhlhornsweg.
