Again, group sessions for this topic included a lot of discussions about terminology. What is blended learning? What is online teaching? Does blending always mean having online and offline courses?
However, everybody immediately knew whats’s meant by emergency remote teaching, the term says it all. The sudden switch to online teaching and learning was especially hard in traditional, “we’re not quite there yet”, mostly offline Germany. At least that was my feeling. In a country where you have to sent a form by email so it can then be printed, scanned and faxed back to you, moving online was a struggle. In the beginning, teachers would just record themselves explaining their lecture slides or simply give the same lecture they would normally hold in front of their students via an online system.
Luckily, things changed during the course of the pandemic at my university. Servers were upgraded extremely fast so that people had much better access to fast internet connections at all times. Web pages to help with online teaching formats and tutorials explaining digital tools were set up and promoted. We already had a learning management system (Stud.IP) set up, but most people only used it for communication and to find out general information about their courses. Now, we began to use all options and plugins of the system and it became a hub for students and teachers alike to stay connected and keep up with courses.
Right now, almost everything has moved back to traditional in presence teaching again. At the same time, the university set up projects like the one I’m working in. We’re trying to keep the great developments that were made during the pandemic and also translate them into different teaching formats. Blended learning and offering digital materials that can be used even before students have started to study are a big part of this. I myself think, that formats such as flipped classroom should be used more often; allowing students to study before the actual course in their own tempo, using well-prepared digital information and then discussing and translating what they have learned during class. This format is more inclusive, fosters the ability to reasearch on their own and is suitable for different levels of background knowledge. I would also like to see more experimental teaching formats using augmented reality and virtual reality. Especially in the natural sciences and medical field there is a great potential in these techniques. What should be kept in mind though is that not every class and every teacher needs fancy digital tools. It is highly important to clearly define learning goals at the start of a course and then find the most suitable format to reach these. Including students in the definition of goals and how they feel they can succeed is also a key component for course design.
