Online Teaching & Digital Transformation

Being interested in virtual teaching and course organization since a long time I started to fully virtualize my courses beginning of 2019 when hardly prompted by the Corona pandemic. The major objectives were to become as independent as possible from external factors like pandemics, sickness, travel limitations or similar, to offer a maximum flexibility and safety to all participants including myself and of course to improve teaching methods and course contents.

I systematically used open-source and self-developed tools to avoid cost at all levels and to be able to adapt features to needs if necessary. An extensive use of digital tools appeared promising and simple as they already existed but it required a virtual platform to share these tools with the students to enable collaborative work and at the same time to achieve the desired independence and flexibility. It was a logic consequence to expand the physical classroom of the campus by virtual space to a virtual classroom. Even this simple step was already an improvement because it was almost impossible to offer group work with digital tools in physical lecture halls that offer nothing but chalkboards and a beamer. By offering a virtual classroom students can still attend the lectures on campus if they prefer to be in physical lecture halls. All students enter the same digital platform of the virtual classroom over the internet by using their preferred and daily used private hardware. They benefit from the use of digital tools by working with other students, independent from where they attend the course. This type of remote working in virtually distributed teams is an essential skill that they will need for the workplace as well. Mid 2022 students had the full flexibility to decide between three modes of study on their personal preference - 'on-site', 'remote', 'fully independent self-paced' or an individual mixture. It is possible to switch presence modes at any time, based on individual decisions and without request.

All course contents are provided paperless including the activities from lectures to exercises and examinations. The classes are organized in short video sequences followed by discussions. Students get a list of guiding questions and prepare the contents from my video lectures. In follow-up sessions, students work on practical exercises and have access to short training videos that explain the exercises. Students have access to anything written on the virtual board in the form of a PDF file after classes. Exercises are now performed in small groups using shared digital tools while before they had to draw circuits and present calculations on chalkboards. Student participation is automatically documented, evaluated and correlated to exam performance at the end of a semester.

Students attend examinations 'on-site' or 'remote' and are allowed to use the entire course material and exercise notes. All examination procedures are supported by a self-programmed environment that generates, encrypts individual examinations not disclosing any personal data. Encrypted examination files are distributed automatically by email or can be downloaded from and uploaded to individual data storage by link or QR-Codes. All procedures are protected by individual logins and passwords. Depending on the setup the environment utilizes two- or three levels of security.

With all these adaptions not a single lecture was canceled during the entire Corona pandemic. All examinations were carried out on time and at comparable or better pass rates. There are no travel needs for participants. All courses are 100% supervised and there is no asynchronous teaching. There are no cost for printing, office storage space is no longer taken up by evaluated examinations and there's no waste for excess prints. Learning curves appear to be steeper (maybe due to the avoiding of chalk and talk teaching) and collaboration with and between students improved, e.g. shy students use the chat function to raise questions. Attendance rates at inconvenient time slots improved and students attend lectures on bridge days from home by remote. The overall attendance discipline improved.

Addenum: Summer Term 2023 (1st Post Corona Semester)

The evaluations of my courses show that examination results degraded slightly at the beginning of the pandemic, recovered within one semester and finally outperformed all former results in the last corona semester while at the same time the minimum level to pass the exam increased and was at the highest level since 2015 in the last corona semester. The attendance discipline as well as the overview of grades improved noticeable during the pandemic and dropped back to former levels after the pandemic as shown by comparison of the 'Attendance to Examination Results Analysis' for summer term '23 [w3].

I decided to offer two special appointments of repetition (Repetitorium) for repeaters, i.e. students that need to repeat examinations and cannot attend the regular appointments because of time conflicts with other courses in their ongoing semesters. Those appointments are only offered at the university campus and it is not possible to log in from remote. It turned out that these offers are welcome opportunities for the students of my regular courses to repeat and connect to other students.

Addenum: Winter Term 2023

The evaluation shows that the examination results improved in the winter term 2023. While the content of the courses was identical to former semesters, the Inverted Classroom Teaching Method was applied the first time in the winter term 2023. The flexibility of this teaching appears to meet students expectations of flexible engagement and independence from punctual classroom attendance. The concept seems to be suitable to manage individual learning speeds and to better integrate the effort that comes with studying at a university into the individual daily routines of students. To safeguard a maximum flexibility to all participants, lectures are supported by MP4 online video sequences and and lab exercises are summarized in digital board summaries (PDF). This allows self-paced preparation and repetition and keeps students involved if appointments were missed. Every module is supported by guiding questions that point students to the most important questions and thereby safeguards a guided self-paced first contact with the content. After this first contact has been built, the courses offers two live appointments; a first appointment for discussing the guiding questions and a second appointment to reproduce the solutions of the lab exercises. The exercises need to be prepared by self-study after the first appointment within a time period of one week. Sample solutions that include the solution paths help students to avoid frustration if getting stuck. See the 'Attendance to Examination Results Analysis' for summer term '23 for more details [w3]. The two special appointments of repetition (Repetitorium) for repeaters were offered again with acceptable attendance rates. There's an interesting observation with these special offers that do not allow remote attendance. Personal contact is requested from time to time by some individuals and raised as an argument against virtual lecture halls and online teaching. The importance of personal contact is emphasized with emotionalism for successful studies but the appointments with personal contact are then not used by exactly those individuals raising the argument.

I have extended the training material with work packages so that repeaters, i.e. students that failed the examination in a former semester, can easily rework the contents. The work packages contain simulation models and introductions of the underlying theory for selected topics that showed high error rates in the examinations. The work packages are the main subjects in the special appointments of repetition.

Addenum: Summer Term 2024

The Inverted Classroom teaching method stimulates self-activities of students because a preparation of contents is absolutely mandatory with this method of teaching. The flipside of the coin is that while self-driven students benefit there's a risk that students not coming up to speed quick enough miss all connections and cannot catch up with the course in the worst case. To provide a second chance for such "late starters" and ease the catch-up of contents the work packages now cover more topics. They now include a practical example with exercises for experimentation and to play with the simulation models. Even students with a proper attendance discipline and good performance benefit from those work packages because experimentation with the simulation models is very useful to better understand the theory and the general principles of operation.

The large variety of course materials makes attendance increasingly less necessary so that in particular the capable and productive students perform their studies outside the appointment hours and just show up occasionally and to raise very specific questions. The two-tier scholar with a clear separation between high and low performers might increase if the aforementioned trend continues or increases. On the other hand this documents the strong disparity of prior knowledge, motivation and discipline and finally of the individual productivity of students in the early semesters of a study. It appears reasonable to not leash the top performers for the forthcoming of low performers while all students should have a fair chance to participate actively and succeed. The individual and flexible way of a virtual classroom with a large variety of course materials seems to be one of the best ways to support the individual learning curves.

Please read the course evaluations for the summer term 2024 for more details [w3].

Addenum: Winter Term 2024

Two years after end of the pandemic the status is back where it came from before the pandemic - when talking about students' attendance discipline, study focus and examination pass rates [w3].

And recently a discussion started on how (especially the contents of the elementary courses in the basic studies) will be "restructured" for all branch of studies at the faculty to align the structures of all branches of studies (technical and economic) and make the enormous challenges of the elementary courses in the Bachelor studies more comfortable for students so that the "study experience" becomes still more pleasant - called "soft start for incomings". Groundbreaking!

The aforementioned "experiment" will show if it is possible to (1) fundamentally reorganize teaching contents without eliminating elementary contentwise structures as well as the compatibility to the course of studies at other Universities (keywords: allowability for outgoing and incoming students), (2) fundamentally alter the structures and the designations (called buzzword flooding by some nasty guys) of study contents for branches of study without spoiling the profiles of acknowledged and approved fields of study, (3) substitute established traditional courses on elementary engineering contents by "small student projects" (maybe referring to today's social media consumer behaviour "click and collect forget") to push students as fast as possible through (their) studies without ruining the study process and annihilating the maybe most important thing of a study - comprehension! There might be reasons to have doubts and - what is more - to question the intentions.

Addenum: Summer Term 2025

See the evaulation statistics [w3] and read the addenum of Winter Term 2024.

There are reasons to assume that some trends in (engineering) education (pls. refer to "Addenum Winter Term 2024") spoil the generality and universality of studies and thereby hinder or even contradict the studying processes, i.e. the academic dispute. Just because of the large knowledge gap between school and university it cannot be the solution to align study plans to the knowledge, to the capabilities, to the motivation and to the willingness of students to achieve. Instead of focusing on fundamentals to close the gaps it appears that students are lured by buzz-words and then get trained (and train themselves) to memorize and repeat procedures of solution.

It appears that here's a trend to systematically remove complexity, abstraction and generality from scientific education programs. Instead of flexibility to adapt study programs to individual performance and a clear message to students on their individual accountability that is reflected by the processes, e.g. self-driven registration for all examinations, there is simplification and welfare at all levels so that the institutions seem to degenerate to welfare departments. There seems to be a growing imbalance in the effort invested into education by trainers and trainees. Study programs are crowded with buzz words, seductive advertisements and focus on procedures of solution (called student projects and practice-oriented education) to let studies appear easy and innovative.

Complexity, abstraction and generality seem to be sacrificed for the sake of performance statistics and student counts. But complexity, generality and abstraction are so important in academic studies that all practice can at best be supportive. A training in abstract thinking and reasoning is indispensable for a diligent academic dispute. It is therefore absolutely necessary that students are demanded to train abstract thinking and to compile understanding for complex theories. Students need to be willing to invest their time and effort in the progress of their working life. They need to sit down, grab the books and accept that their decision to enroll will affect their work life balance for some time. Instead, an increasing number of students appear tired, demotivated, hesitant and reluctant from the first day on. Why is that? Are students distracted or do not have a clear objective target? Alongside all assistance, support, sympathy for and patience with students a selection process for incoming students and an screening of the individual study progress with a clear feedback on performance is needed to safeguard student success and efficient resource usage.

Personal Comments

My teaching benefits significantly from the inverted classroom teaching method, from the flexibility of the virtual classroom, from the digital preparation and post-processing of the course contents. Students are better prepared than before and I have more time to prepare teaching and exercise contents. It appears that the atmosphere in the virtual teaching room is more relaxed, in particular when temperatures are high or other factors of stress exist. The feedback of the students is good.

Personally, I am traveling much less for teaching purposes and have more contact time with my students. Due to less travel activities I am able to balance my work and family responsibilities much better. My hobbies and recreation benefits from time savings; work-life balance improved while increasing services for my students at the same timne.