The path into the Semester #1 – »The digital Summer Semester 2020«

Barely three weeks ago, on 13. March, the city of Weimar issued a general decree due to the spread of the coronavirus. The new regulations essentially shut down the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar for classes. On the same day, the Presidents of Thuringia's universities postponed the start of the 2020 summer semester until May. However, it's not yet possible to predict when and in what form attendance will be resumed. 

Prof. Dr Winfried Speitkamp, President of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, expressly advocates starting the semester in a different and particularly creative way, »We're making every effort to work towards restarting the university at the end of the crisis period. It will be new, it will be challenging, but still promising.« 

Across all faculties, professors and their staff are organising their courses with the planned content, but employing digital tools and resources. The »Arbeitsgruppe Studium.Digital« is coordinating activities within the university. 

Prof. Dr. Christian Koch, Vice-President of Academic Affairs since April, said, »We want to start on 4. May, digitally, for the time being, but definitely get started. We're working hard to provide the necessary hardware and software and to train our lecturers so that we can start early in May. In addition, we have to clarify with the students whether and to what extent they have access to their own hardware and software as well as Internet access.« 

The Bauhaus-Universität Weimar allows digital teaching and learning in a variety of ways. The common starting point for most applications is the central learning management system Moodle. According to Vice President Prof. Dr. Jutta Emes, »With Moodle, different course formats and processes can be organised, starting with course enrollment and scheduling. This includes the provision of materials and file exchange. For example, students and teachers of a course can create wiki pages or blogs together and concurrently integrate material from the semester collection of the university library«. 

This means that studies will look very different in the upcoming weeks and months, and we can expect a major change for all those involved. »Of course, physical work in workshops, during workshops and excursions cannot simply be replaced by digital formats. This is where we all have to completely rethink things«, Prof. Koch describes the starting point. 

But how are digital teaching formats actually created? Approaches will differ depending on the subject; media scientists' seminars are certainly easier to hold digitally than group work and consultations with architects in front of models. 

»In this case, the creativity of the lecturers is particularly important, as they will receive extensive advice and support from Institutional Development for the changeover – both for technical implementation and with regard to the didactic design of the courses«, says Prof. Emes. Analogue formats are not converted one-to-one into digital formats, instead, lectures, for example, may be divided into smaller units. The ›Flipped Classroom‹, for instance, offers the opportunity to hand out assignments to students. Then, they work on the tasks individually or in groups to acquire fundamentally new knowledge. Only after that will new contact with the lecturers take place in the form of a question and answer session to deepen what has already been learned and to solve problems and to inspire further food for thought.  

This may sound simple, but preparing the digital content is time-consuming for the lecturers and the eLab is there to offer support. Among other things, the eLab has put together a ›Digital Toolbox‹ on the website https://www.uni-weimar.de/de/universitaet/studium/digital-studieren, which presents all the digital tools available and provides short explanatory videos, for example on Moodle or the BigBlueButton conference tool. There are also student eTutors who are trained in the use of the applications and help lecturers to prepare for the semester.

The interaction between students and teachers is especially important to ensure successful studying, which is why digital rooms are so important. The DFNconf-Pexip service can also be used for this purpose. It supports collaborative teaching and learning and enables synchronous as well as asynchronous working, especially for online lectures and webinars with their incredibly important interactions and feedback loops.

Meanwhile, it is not only the teaching tools that will be new in the upcoming semester. President Speitkamp is hopeful, »No semester during and after the crisis can take place as if nothing has happened. The crisis challenges our certainties and we must ask new questions«. The university has responded by launching a special call for proposals within the framework of the Bauhaus.Module, which supports projects that deal with the current social situation. With this, the university management explicitly encourages the call for new topics in the face of the crisis. 

Prof. Nathalie Singer, Professor of Experimental Radio and former Vice-President of Academic Affairs, together with the student radio station bauhaus.fm, is initiating a radio programme that looks at the present from the future: »Shift.fm – Remote Radio«. Students from various disciplines will look at the current crisis situation from the perspective of summer 2021 and make utopian or dystopian reflections: What has changed in the crisis situation? What do we as a society want to keep and what do we want to reject? Students will also examine the cultural techniques of radio since it has to be produced »remotely«. A discussion must simultaneously take place at different locations or the experimental concert must be recorded without musicians meeting each other. New aesthetic opportunities may even arise from this. 

In addition, the students will take an interdisciplinary look at the ›Here and Now‹ and involve students from media philosophy or biology in the programme design. »The aim is to create an artistic radio that reflects the rapidly changing present in terms of artistic content. This also gives the individual the opportunity to discover himself/herself within all of it,« explains Prof. Singer. »Shift.fm – the Remote Radio« is to be broadcast from mid-June until July. 

The Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and the digital semester – many aspects of teaching will change starting in May, but future-oriented topics and the experimental character will continue to play an important role. Further formats and projects for the 2020 summer semester and their development will be discussed in the next articles in this series.