-
The coronavirus pandemic has drastically changed everyday university life. Photo: University of Oldenburg
-
Empty seminar rooms characterised the campus in the 2020 summer semester, with teaching mainly taking place online. Photo: University of Oldenburg
That's it! A look back at the summer semester (part 1)
Semester start postponed, all courses digital: the past summer semester was a particular challenge for everyone. Here, lecturers and students report on how they coped with their new everyday university life.
Dr Sylvia Jahnke-Klein is a research assistant at the Institute of Educational Sciences and currently administers the professorship for school education with a focus on school development:
"The summer semester was instructive for everyone in terms of digital skills, but also very exhausting. In the end, everything went well, but the workload was immense! The Data Centre and University Didactics did an excellent job and made it possible for good teaching to succeed online.
I found the students to be very understanding and constructive. Somehow we managed it together and the oral examinations show that a lot was learnt despite everything. And I was once again able to see that our teacher training programme is effective: Master's students have created some really good digital teaching units as course certificates, such as webquests, courseware units, padlets and Wordpress blogs. These make it clear that the students have learnt over the course of their studies how to create learning paths that are both effective and motivating.
What remains of the 2020 summer semester: Online teaching has worked amazingly well thanks to a huge effort on everyone's part, but I certainly don't want this to be a permanent state; teacher training thrives on lively dialogue."
Prof Dr Anja Bräuer heads the Department of Anatomy at the University Medical Centre, Dr Veysel Ödemis is a research assistant and teaching coordinator in the department:
"The lockdown has hit us Oldenburg medical students during the current semester. We had already started normal face-to-face teaching at the beginning of March. From one day to the next, we had to switch to exclusively digital teaching in anatomy, one of the most teaching-intensive subjects in medicine. This was and still is a challenge: we had to familiarise ourselves intensively with the use of digital media. But after the initial, still bumpy beginnings, we were able to integrate this quite well into our everyday teaching. We lecturers have learnt a lot of new things about using digital media and will try to continue integrating these skills into our everyday teaching and faculty life. We believe that the pandemic period will give a boost to university digitalisation, including for anatomy.
However, social contact with other students and us lecturers is very important, especially for first-year students. And studying medicine is all about 'touching, examining and understanding'. We are therefore delighted that our colleagues from Groningen are giving us the opportunity to teach macroscopic teaching on body donations in person again in the winter semester. After all, basic knowledge about the structure of the body and the functional and topographical relationships of organ systems cannot be taught exclusively via digital media."
In the video, medical student Carolin talks about how the transition to the digital semester went for her and the challenges she had to face as a tutor.
Prof Dr Ira Diethelm is a university lecturer in the didactics of computer science at the Department of Computing Science:
"As I had already recorded my lecture "Didactics of Computing Science I" as an mp3 in the lecture theatre in previous years, I was able to benefit from this this year. The recordings can be accessed via StudIP and are intended for students who are unable to attend due to overlaps or other commitments. They are designed in such a way that you don't need the slides when listening, but possibly only for reference.
I wanted to maintain this during the coronavirus period. Many of my students already have children and for this reason, like me, were particularly reliant on flexible formats. After I had recorded the first lecture sitting at my desk and staring at the wall, I quickly realised that I couldn't do this for the whole semester. The dynamic was completely missing. I therefore started to add an intro to existing recordings, for example, which contained a question or an online enquiry.
This year, there were around 50 students enrolled in the lecture, usually slightly fewer. Ten to 15 of them regularly attended the exercise, which my colleague Nils Pancratz also conducted online, but synchronised. Fewer people than usual have registered for the oral examinations so far. Many students have expressed the wish to take the exam in the autumn. We will of course make this possible.
Overall, everything went well, but I really missed the direct dialogue with the students and their spontaneous feedback. I look forward to when the conditions are such that this is possible again without any complications."
Max-Simon Kaestner is a research assistant in the Department of Didactics of History:
"It's not an easy task to summarise the lecture period of this summer semester, because I look back - now with some distance - with mixed feelings. It was very exciting to have to rely consistently on digital formats for the first time when designing the courses. "Rethinking" the seminars, most of which had already been planned, was a pleasure and unleashed creativity, but in some phases it also took a lot of time and a few nerves. One challenge was to quickly find an alternative type of examination for the students who were unable to collect data as part of the research and development internship due to the school closures. I will always remember the lively exchange within our working group and the tips from e-didactics and IT services. Both helped me a lot in preparing the courses.
The students played a big part in the largely successful online semester. I was really impressed by how well a large proportion of them dealt with online teaching in my courses. Not only did many students show great flexibility, they also enriched the courses with exciting and creative answers to historical didactic questions and problems. Nevertheless, in a joint review with the students, it became clear that exercises in particular cannot take place exclusively online without losses.
For the time after the pandemic, I hope that teachers and students will retain the openness to new ideas that was evident in many places during the semester. However, the desire for a return to face-to-face dialogue with students and colleagues is just as strong."
Topics
- Astronomy
- Biology
- Botanical garden
- Chemistry
- Computing Science
- Cooperations
- Covid
- Culture
- Dutch Studies
- Early Career
- Economics
- Educational Sciences
- Energy
- Energy Research
- Environmental Sciences
- Equal opportunities
- German Studies
- Graduate academy
- Health Services Research
- Higher Education Policy
- History
- Human Medicine
- International affairs
- Marine Sciences
- Material Culture
- Medical ethics
- Medical Physics and Acoustics
- Music
- Neuroscience
- People
- Philosophy
- Physics
- Presidential Board
- Psychology
- Research
- Slavic Studies
- Social Sciences
- Special Needs Education
- Sport Science
- Study Affairs
- Sustainability
- Teacher Education
- Theology
- Transfer
- University Medicine
- Ukraine
- Wind Physics