Challenge accepted – Digital teaching at the WOT professorship

The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated restrictions on everyday university life also pose new challenges for teaching staff in particular. At the Chair of Materials and Surface Engineering, a consistent focus was placed on switching to digital teaching right at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, so that all teaching formats could and can be made available to students in digital form in the 2020 summer semester.

Depending on the format, various options for digital knowledge transfer are used. The lectures are provided in the form of so-called screencasts – these are video files of the scripts or slide sets with an 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 tutorials, 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 Chemnitz University of Technology, is used for this purpose. In addition to the direct verbal and written exchange, it also offers the possibility of integrating quick surveys into the seminar as well as working on tasks in small groups or in larger groups via a multi-user mode.

Students do not have to do without the practicals this semester either. Within a short space of time, the WOT professorship has produced numerous demonstration videos of various practical experiments with commentary, some of which students can only watch after passing short tests integrated into OPAL.

Transferring our courses to the digital space in such a way that they continue to complement each other in a meaningful way, while at the same time designing them didactically in this new environment in such a way that the desired learning success is achieved by the students, is a challenge that should not be underestimated in many respects, but one that the lecturers at the WOT professorship have gladly accepted. In any case, the increase in knowledge regarding digital teaching formats is very valuable and will enrich teaching at the WOT professorship even beyond the corona crisis.

Picture:
Dr 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… )