Challenge accepted – Digital teaching at the WOT professorship
The COVID 19 pandemic and the associated restrictions on everyday university life pose new challenges, especially for those working in teaching. At the Chair of Materials and Surface Engineering, the switch to digital teaching was already made at the beginning of the Corona crisis, so that all teaching formats could and can be made available to students in digital form in the summer semester of 2020.
Depending on the format, various possibilities of digital knowledge transfer are used. The lectures are provided in the form of so-called screencasts – these are video files of the lecture notes or slide sets with audio commentary by the lecturer. These are integrated into the OPAL learning platform so that students can listen to the lecture at any time.
Seminars and exercises, on the other hand, are offered as synchronous teaching formats, i.e. as online video conferences. The conference system BigBlueButton, which has been further developed by the TU Chemnitz, is used for this purpose. In addition to direct verbal and written exchange, it also offers the possibility of integrating quick polls into the seminar as well as having tasks worked on in small groups or in larger groups via a multi-user mode.
The students do not have to do without the practicals this semester either. Within a short period of time, numerous demonstration videos of various practical experiments have been produced at the WOT Chair, accompanied by comments, which the students – in part can only view after passing short tests – integrated into OPAL.
Transferring our courses into the digital space in such a way that they still complement each other meaningfully, and at the same time designing them didactically in this new environment in such a way that the desired learning success occurs for the students, is definitely a challenge that should not be underestimated in many respects, but which the teachers at the WOT Chair have gladly accepted. The increase in knowledge with regard to digital teaching formats is very valuable in any case and will enrich the teaching at the WOT professorship even beyond the Corona crisis.
Image:
Dr.-Ing. Rico Drehmann during an online seminar as part of the course „Surface and Interface Engineering“
22.6.2020 – Teaching at the professorship ( rico.drehmann@mb… )
