Suddenly online: Teaching for over 1000 lectures and seminars
How online elements were quickly integrated into teaching
FAU without face-to-face teaching? This was the problem that teaching staff, the Executive Board, University Administration and FAU’s services were suddenly confronted with at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Alternatives to face-to-face teaching had to be implemented quickly. Sónia Hetzner, director of the Innovation in Learning Institute (ILI) at FAU, talks about the most intense period of time she has ever experienced at FAU.
Video conferencing, home-made videos, webinars, online courses, digital conferences, and live streaming have become part of our everyday lives
ILI is an FAU institution that has been developing online teaching and e-learning at FAU for many years. Even though the Institute has been focussing on online teaching, which involves combining innovation in teaching and technology in an educational setting, for 30 years now, the coronavirus pandemic changed everything as everybody suddenly needed our help. With the onset of the lockdown, we had to help with switching from face-to-face teaching to digital formats in a very short space of time.
This drastic change means that teaching at FAU is currently experiencing an intense restructuring process. And even if many people are yearning to return to face-to-face teaching, this change is unstoppable as face-to-face teaching after the corona pandemic will still have online elements. Until recently, video conferencing, home-made videos, webinars, online courses, digital conferences, and live streaming were concepts and terms that only a few people were familiar with. They have now become part of our teaching routine.
What have we been doing exactly?
We consolidated all that ILI offers on the schnell-digital.fau.de website and made it available to all teaching staff. The focus was always on helping others to help themselves and the idea that no-one is to be left alone.
Information
We wanted to quickly provide teaching staff at FAU with concepts, tools and instructions on how to switch to online teaching. We therefore put all the relevant information on the schnell-digital.fau.de website.
Advice
We set up an advice service (e-mail and phone), held countless phone calls and answered around 1000 mails sent to ‘schnell-digital!’. Over 3000 inquiries were sent to the StudOn mailbox during the last 15 weeks.
Active support
By 11 May 2020, the ‘schnell digital!’ support programme had received requests for support for around 1000 lectures and seminars. Everyone who submitted an application was also able to discuss and design their own individual media-based teaching concept with the digital learning experts at ILI during an individual coaching session. During these sessions, participants were given suggestions on how to produce teaching materials at short notice and find the perfect balance between covering course content and catering to the needs of the students. Several chairs and degree programmes are now benefiting from financial support for purchasing equipment or for student assistants for implementing and providing support for online teaching. The total amount of funding was 120,000 euros.
Further training
We have ten open independent learning courses on topics such as how to transfer seminars to online teaching, StudOn for beginners and advanced participants, and how to mentor students online, and made them available to all teaching staff at FAU. By setting up ZOOM coaching sessions, online training for Camtasia, and video and StudOn consultations, we reacted quickly to the needs of teaching staff for the transition to online teaching.
Finding solutions together
We set up an online forum so that staff could exchange ideas and motivate each other. Users shared a great deal of information in 230 posts (with the top thread about Zoom). There have been over 3000 visitors to the ‘schnell-digital’ forum.
The first weeks of lockdown
During the first few weeks of the lockdown, we had daily ILI team meetings (with several children, some cats and a dog) and we developed, extended, amended, redefined and (almost) completed our solutions with factual discussions, humour, enthusiasm for our work and creativity.
We are very satisfied with the results of our summer semester. We have received very positive feedback from the FAU community. We have also received some great feedback from our international community at universities such as KU Leuven, MIT, the Universities of Leeds, Oxford, Amsterdam and Leiden at our annual Media and Learning Conference, which took place online this year.
Social distancing brings us together
On a personal level, I found the solidarity and the willingness to work together at FAU very exciting and very positive. Meeting, discussing, planning, implementing and helping each other became a matter of course. The FAU family demonstrated true greatness in a time of great need. This crisis was an enormous challenge for us, however, it also sparked the potential in our team and the entire FAU to create something new and positive. This means we are growing and learning together more than ever, despite social distancing.
Remote emergency teaching is a success. We hope to make everything even better during the coming winter semester, as we are already planning our solutions for the ‘hybrid’ semester. We have set ourselves quite a task!