"Virtual and very real" - review of the summer semester (part 2)

"The suddenly digital summer semester 2020 went surprisingly smoothly in my perception. Fortunately, everyone involved pulled together right from the start: The students understood the need for the changeover, the IT services expanded our technical capacities with astonishing speed, and the Presidential Board not only steered us in the right direction, but also provided very pleasant communication throughout.

I myself was very lucky that my wife effectively managed the "homeschooling" of our children on her own - otherwise, as a lecturer, I might have been lost in the chaos. This allowed me to concentrate on further developing the content of two central teaching modules as planned and digitising them at the same time. The unofficial feedback from the students was very positive.

For the future, I hope that the university will reflect constructively and critically on the extent to which digital elements should be retained in teaching after the end of the coronavirus crisis. In my opinion, there is a significant gain in flexibility for students, at least for traditional lectures in which so-called explicit knowledge is to be conveyed. They can now freely choose the place, time, speed and frequency of working through lecture videos. In the future, there could be similar gains in flexibility for lecturers. However, I don't see this advantage for seminars and other events that thrive on discourse and the exchange of implicit knowledge. As far as these are concerned, I'm looking forward to communicating with students in person again as soon as possible."

"In my seminars, the students usually develop small teaching sequences themselves, in which they try out lots of things in practice and thus learn and teach simple Computing Science basics. Converting this format into purely online seminars was completely new for me and naturally meant extra work. In the meantime, I see this as a gain: whereas in previous semesters the students learnt and taught about the digital world, they now used precisely these digital media for learning and teaching.

The re-registering students were positive about the seminar: Above all, the reference to the current situation, in which teachers are faced with the task of realising their lessons using digital tools, motivated many to try out the tips and ideas for designing online learning units themselves.

However, I lacked personal contact with the students - despite regular video chats. But very few students used their cameras or microphones, so I never saw most of them. In a new programme, I would make this more personal. I'm satisfied with how the summer semester went and I've gained a lot of experience that I can use and build on in the winter semester."

"Switching our teaching to digital formats was not easy - especially for seminars with a practical focus, such as the preparation for school internships or visits to extracurricular learning centres. I received help from colleagues who had prepared digital modules for the school internships for the teachers. My students were actively involved in the digital seminar work and the student assistants tirelessly tested apps and plug-ins and reflected the moods from the seminars back to me. In the long term, digitalisation will bring more diversity to teaching. This semester has shown me that independent and sustainable digital study is possible: the students' online results have generated direct feedback outside the seminar through publications and can also be used in my teaching in the future.

A particular challenge for me, as for many students and colleagues, was the additional care of children at home. Studying at night, caring for and teaching children during the day - certainly not a reasonable model, but one that has been reported to me. When there is hardly any time left to answer the question of work-life balance and the digital home office makes it possible to work at any (in)conceivable time and situation, it is important to communicate with each other. However, I haven't had enough verbal communication this semester. I'll be paying attention to this in future - because right now we need a strong sense of togetherness."