DIGITAL TEACHING

You are not alone! Of course you are responsible for the teaching but accept help. Teaching support structures at OVGU include, but are not limited to, the UCC (online teaching website), the eLearning Working Group, the Library, the Continuing Education Campus, the Media Center and many dedicated individuals. At present, there is a lot of hard work going on in all of these departments, and the available support structures are not always adequate or it might take a while for you to receive an answer from them. It may be that your first steps in online teaching are not perfect, but our aim is to improve your classes together over the semesters.

Use the coronavirus crisis and start a dialog with your colleagues. In many departments at OVGU there are points of contact who have a great deal of experience and are ready to share their knowledge.

You might even receive assistance from the students themselves. There are often tech-savvy people among them who can be brought on board to help. Or switch roles: students can, for example, work with you on online formats, devise digital content for lower semesters or develop digital teaching and learning scenarios with their lecturers.

Moreover, there is now also an immense range of offerings on the internet, such as the university’s Digitization Forum website or blogs from teaching and learning centers at other universities. Or you can network with others via the university’s Digitization Forum information exchange platform, Mattermost.

Yes, for many it is a leap into the unknown. The switch from face-to-face teaching to teaching entirely online is a massive change from existing practices - and in some cases feels like throwing many years of teaching experience overboard. Nevertheless, uncertainty is normal, and our students are actually accepting of what is currently an uncertain and fast-changing situation. It is important to: Be open about your thoughts, and also the challenges and uncertainties (for example, your unease with some aspects of online teaching).

It takes time to put together well thought-out online courses - and that is precisely what we are lacking. So you cannot exploit every opportunity right now. Dial down your expectations and recognize that your efforts will sometimes only reach the “good enough” level. Frustrations for both lecturers and students need to be taken into consideration in advance. Communicate with one another: this will reduce frustration and help bring about improvements. In this way you will be able to improve your online teaching step by step, week by week.

A big change in teaching habits also offers a valuable opportunity to examine one’s own teaching role and personality and ask oneself questions, such as: 

• What are my strengths? 
• What is important to me in teaching (e.g. focus on knowledge transfer, interaction, experiential nature, soft skills or ...)? 
• Which aspects of personality play a part in my own teaching (am I, for example, more of an extrovert or an introvert)? 

You can use this as the foundation for your teaching - especially online. For example: is interaction between the students important to you? Then plan in plenty of opportunities for group working, forum discussions and chats.

You do not need to throw all of your existing teaching concepts overboard. Which aspects of teaching can you recreate online at a low threshold? These might, for example, include lecture formats that can either be recorded in audio or video format and made available online. Self-study phases can be guided relatively easily online.

It is clear that the usual teaching methods cannot be transferred on a one for one basis to online formats and that new approaches will be needed. Do not overload yourself with the didactic and technical demands, instead continue to focus on your own content-related expertise. In other words put content before format! It is important to assess things here and ask yourself: what are the most important skills, competences and aspects of knowledge around which the course should revolve? 

Other useful questions include: what did I do in face-to-face teaching, and why? which objectives was I pursuing with which aspects of teaching? Keep the teaching objectives in mind and make them transparent. This can help, if necessary, to reassess your teaching content.

Two things need to be prioritized: (I) Strengthening the cooperation between students - (e.g. forum discussions or the targeted and facilitated formation of chat groups, if necessary also WhatsApp groups). If you are working with Zoom, it is possible to set up a parallel “room” for students (with facilitation rights). Other possibilities for promoting dialog include designating talk partners or creating small groups. (II) As a teacher, you should communicate clearly, provide feedback and be accessible. Organizational questions need to be clarified in the beginning (e.g. where can I find material? Are there deadlines to keep?). Establish reliable communication routes in both directions and via multiple channels (by video, mail, chats, etc.).

Avoid using complex, new and/or innovative tools! To get started more quickly, it is better to use tools that are already used in your own department or by other colleagues, e.g. Zoom or the tools offered by the German Research Network (DFN) - for example, Adobe Connect and Pexip.

The basic, asynchronous possibilities offered by Moodle are usually also low-threshold (e.g. the use of a forum as a joint communication channel for content-related and organizational questions).

It is obvious that even the best tools cannot fully replace face-to-face interaction. It is, however, entirely possible to achieve learning objectives in other ways than by simply aping the analog teaching-learning situation.

Now is the time, after your very first attempts at online teaching, to allow further steps to follow - not least because an end to the consequences of attempting to contain the pandemic is not yet on the cards.

In the following video, Mathias Magdowski makes additional suggestions for the digitization of teaching in the face of the coronavirus crisis, especially for Otto von Guericke University in Magdeburg. In the film he discusses dos and don’ts of asynchronous versus synchronous teaching, feedback culture and the planning of learning objectives.

You should generally take into account the following principles when planning your teaching:

• Communicate often and in a timely manner:
  changes to teaching content or the course organization should be communicated in good time to the participants. But please note: you should not become a spammer either. Let participants know at regular intervals about changes that are relevant to the course.

• Let the participants know what you expect from them and what they can expect from you.
  For example, how often the participants should check their inboxes, how long should they expect to have to wait for an answer or feedback from you, or which channels will be used to provide them with information.

• Optimize your communication:
  use a platform (Q&A forum) where you can record questions that are regularly asked by participants and include your answers. The participants should know to look on this platform first if they have questions before they send their queries to the course leader. On the other hand, the answers to individual questions from participants could be sent to all students on the course if it seems reasonable to do so.

• Set office hours and communicate them. The students can reach you online at these times.

• Let the students know if you make new material available for the course. This can be done, for example, via a Moodle course.

• Only provide information that any student can open and read without difficulty. 
  Wherever possible, use free standard file formats such as PDFs.

• Learning materials are usually best delivered using multimedia.
  There are different tools for recording screencasts, with which, for example, short lecture sequences can be recorded. Experiments should also be recorded. These videos can then be made available to the participants in the university’s Mediasite catalog. It is recommended that you only record short video sequences. Your students will be grateful to you if they are able to directly access certain content from a lecture instead of having to search through an hour-long video for the relevant part.

• Use a variety of tools and/or offer different tools to your students so that they can check their progress. Videos can, for example, be supplemented with questionnaires (on the subject matter and/or to check comprehensibility) or a Q&A forum. Answers from the forum can in turn be made available to all students.

Plan a webinar at regular intervals with which you can work online together on a subject with the participants.