Remote teaching

The Corona Crisis is throwing off our lives. I was also not spared, though this is now probably complaining on a high comfort level: As some of you know, I was on a sabbatical since last fall traveling with my wife through Southeast Europe (check our travel blog Engel auf Reisen), but due to the outbreak of COVID-19 we had to abort it and are now back in Germany.

I’m curious to know if we will have more or less research papers written during the summer term. On the one hand, people are forced to sit at home and are restricted about their free time activities. So will they write more papers out of boredom? But on the other hand, if you are supposed to be teaching this summer, you probably have your hands full with adapting your lecture or seminar to remote teaching.

It is actually a pity for me that I’m not teaching this summer. Over the last few semesters I was constantly incorporating online activities into my lectures, resp. exercise classes, and now would be the opportunity to profit from the experience I gained. One thing that I learned is the following and I certainly want to share it with you:

Putting a detailed script of your lecture online is probably a good first step, but does not qualify on its own as good remote teaching!

Remember that not only you as a lecturer are doing remote teaching for the first time, but your students are also likely to do remote learning for their very first time! So they probably also need advice and guidance for how to approach this task.

By the way, if you happen to have an excellent idea about remote teaching, you can try to make it a Hochschulperle des Monats (and, along the way, cash 1.000 EUR). Click here for more information: link. AND don’t forget to write me an eMail with this idea, so that I can steal it! ^^ (Actually, I will probably write a blog post about it here, so that others can use it, too.)

Finally, let me mention the FernUniversität in Hagen (click here for their maths department: link). They have years over years of experience in remote teaching of mathematics. So it certainly would make sense to contact them and ask them about their way of teaching mathematics remotely and all the nice ideas and tricks about it that they certainly have!