Archives

Lessons Learned
Vol. 2 No. 2 (2022)

The fourth issue of the Lessons Learned Journal, the second issue in the second volume. This means, strictly speaking, a milestone for the development of the Journal. With this issue, a state has been reached in which two issues per year have been published in two consecutive years. This now quasi-established structure shows at the same time the interest that exists in the further development of teaching even after the end of the Corona Pandemic. Thus, this interest is not only driven by the necessities generated by the Corona Pandemic, but an intrinsic willingness to modernize university teaching has developed.

The current issue shows that this development has gained importance and interest far beyond the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, where the Lessons Learned concept originated, and far beyond the TU Dresden.

The first part of the fourth Lessons Learned conference is published in this issue. The second part, which will contain the further contributions to Lessons Learned IV, is planned for early summer 2023. This will result in the future structure for the issues of the Journal: two issues will regularly result from a Lessons Learned conference. One will be published about half a year after the conference at the end of the year, the second in the following spring. Thus, the Journal's structure takes into account the workload that faculty face at universities today. Notwithstanding this, all contributors can now choose the date of publication of their contribution to the conference and clock it into their work schedules. This should make it possible in the future to comprehensively record and make available the valuable results that result from the further development of university teaching.

In terms of content, the current issue shows that the development of new teaching concepts using digital components has not slowed down after the Corona pandemic, but rather increased. It also becomes clear that the effort to combine the use of digital elements with face-to-face teaching and thus to keep the focus on academic exchange in presence has taken on a central role, irrespective of the renewal of individual teaching components with digital elements. In addition, it is apparent - and this can already be seen from the covers of the contributions - that the further development of modernized teaching concepts is accompanied by evaluation across the board. That is, the new development of components of university teaching is carried out with the student perspective in mind, and the components developed are optimized on the basis of the experience gained from the evaluations.

Through the Design Based Research approach that is clear from many articles - even if this term is not usually used - the name of the journal retains its meaning even after the pandemic. It is no longer just about describing the Lessons Learned that emerged from the pandemic. Rather, it is about discussing the lessons learned that emerge from the renewal of teaching in interaction with students and sharing and making available the relevant experiences.

But this issue does not just highlight current developments in the use of digital components in university teaching. Rather, Cornelia Breitkopf's article shows that digital components in teaching are nothing really new. Ten years of ThermoE are a sign that the possibilities of digital teaching are immense and sustainable. At the same time, they show that there is an inertia in the transformation of university teaching at universities, since the corresponding possibilities were already pointed out ten years ago, but were not recognized. Now it is possible to learn from these immense experiences!

With this in mind, we look forward to welcoming you to the fifth Lessons Learned Conference in Dresden in the summer of 2023, with written papers available in the late 2023 and early 2024 editions.

Stefan Odenbach
Lessons Learned
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2023)

Issue five of the Lessons Learned Journal, the first issue in the third volume - this issue contains the second part of the fourth Lessons Learned conference from the summer of 2022. The division of the contributions from the last Lessons Learned conference de-stresses the preparation of manuscripts after the conference. This allows many authors to much more easily prepare their manuscripts at their leisure than would be the case in a situation where all papers would necessarily be available a few weeks after the conference. Therefore, this structure of dividing contributions into two issues will be maintained. The issue to be published in winter 2023 will contain initial articles from the fifth Lessons Learned conference in summer 2023. All further contributions to this conference will then appear in the first half of 2024.

In terms of content, this issue is divided into two core blocks. On the one hand, it contains a number of methodological aspects that once again expand the toolbox with which one can try out modern novel concepts in teaching in one's own everyday teaching. From reading logs, which are intended to support the self-study process, to a podcast project for students and asynchronous hybrid lab courses, to concepts that go under the heading of gaming, a wide variety of concept ideas are presented here and described in such a way that you can experiment with them yourself in your teaching.

The other large block of topics deals with the increasingly important issue of blended learning. Here, the headings of the articles already show that such concepts which combine digital and presence elements, synchronous and asynchronous aspects and the most diverse forms of teaching/learning are complex in their design and are definitely not uniformly defined. Whether one speaks of blended learning, inverted classroom or other terms used in this context is still almost arbitrary at the moment, as there are actually no fixed definitions. This makes it difficult to find examples for the design of own concepts. With the four articles that appear in this issue, a broad spectrum of possibilities is shown and it also becomes clear where problems can arise. In any case, this is a topic that will have a firm place in teaching development in the coming years.

The issue opens with the topic of Open Educational Resources (OER) - a decidedly important thematic block: the free distribution of teaching/learning materials is a core source for disseminating novel teaching/learning concepts. In some ways, the Lessons Learned conferences and the associated journal are an ideal example of how a free exchange of ideas in teaching is possible and can be successful. But providing concrete materials is a bit more complicated than describing the teaching concepts. Issues of platforms, promotion of content, and its licensing open up a complex field that requires competent partners who can advise faculty on these issues. These are usually the university libraries - in the case of Dresden, the Saxon State and University Library (SLUB). Only the interaction of all forces can, in the long run, advance the modernization of teaching and keep it dynamic; and this dynamic will determine whether the dynamic modernization process that university teaching has been experiencing for the past three years will continue and lead to an overall modernized university teaching.

With this in mind, we are looking forward to the fifth Lessons Learned Conference, which will begin in a few days. New ideas, many discussions and exciting reports in the Lessons Learned Journal are to be expected.

Stefan Odenbach
Vol. 1 No. 1/2 (2021)

Editorial

Lessons Learned - that was probably a quasi-compelling thought for many teachers at the end of the summer term 2020.

Forced by the Covid 19 pandemic, ways had to be found in the shortest possible time to maintain university teaching - without any form of face-to-face teaching. Lectures had to be digitised and made available. Exercises had to be pressed into new formats in order to be able to hold them at all. Seminars, which are often based on discussion, had to be moved to virtual rooms, and concepts had to be developed for practical courses, which actually require the use of experimental facilities at the university, in order to avoid interrupting the course of study.

All of this required the use of new techniques and technology as well as learning processes for the teachers, which often took place in stages, in which offers were optimised piece by piece and made available in ever new ways. In the process, many Lessons Learned appeared, many new insight was gained that made this first Corona term possible at all. At the end of the term, the need to offer digital exams added a new challenge that had to be overcome.

This comprehensive learning and development process was not limited to individual universities or individual countries, it was a worldwide necessity that the university teaching sector had to face. In the end, formats emerged that made it possible to conduct the summer term 2020 without attendance and largely successfully. At the end of the term, it was clear to everyone involved that the work done, regardless of the pandemic, did not mean a purely temporary change in teaching. In a few months, a development process to modernise teaching and learning had emerged that would normally take years, if not decades. That the two following terms would also be marked by the pandemic was not yet foreseeable at that time. Nevertheless, it was clear that the further development of digital teaching formats could not take place at individual professorships, in individual faculties or locally at individual universities. Rather, the exchange of those who have set up, developed and used these formats is crucial in order to bring about a profitable further development of the digital revolution in teaching.

Against this background, the Lessons Learned - Spin Offs of Digital Teaching Experiences conference was launched at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at TU Dresden in autumn 2020. It serves as an exchange forum where teachers can share and discuss their experiences, their successes, but also the failures of attempts to develop new teaching concepts in the digital space. To further the dissemination of these digital developments, the journal Lessons Learned has been created to share information and stimulate discussion on a completely free open access basis.

In this first issue, which is deliberately a double issue, the contributions of the first two Lessons Learned conferences in autumn 2020 and spring 2021 are summarised. In its further development, the journal will both continue to accompany the conference and shed light on specific problem areas of digital teaching and its further development via themed issues.

With the first 240 pages of digital teaching experiences, we hope that you will enjoy studying the experiences presented here and that you will have the courage to experiment with adapted formats and present them at one of the next Lessons Learned conferences.

Stefan Odenbach
Lessons Learned
Vol. 3 No. 2 (2023)

The second issue of the third year of the Lessons Learned Journal draws on some of the contributions from the fifth Lessons Learned conference in summer 2023. The contributions show - and this is as surprising as it is gratifying - that the contribution structure has changed over the course of the Lessons Learned conferences. While in the first years the focus was clearly on the findings from the corona semesters and thus clearly structured assignments of articles to individual subject areas were possible, we now see a holistic approach to the renewal of academic teaching, which is actually reflected in all contributions. This leads to the problem that a simple sorting of articles by categories such as "Flipped Classroom" or "Teaching Videos" is no longer possible (this time the sorting is simply by date of receipt). On the other hand, it is the gratifying document of the fact that the momentum created by the developments of the corona crisis has now become a permanent element in the development of academic teaching.

In addition, we see throughout the articles an intense desire on the part of teachers to incorporate student feedback into the development of their teaching. This results in truly student-centered teaching, and this can be seen in a wide variety of teaching and learning forms. The topic of evaluating teaching can be found in many articles and is also the subject of a separate article in this issue - and thus perhaps an impetus to look for evaluation options for teaching yourself, possibly using the modular system proposed in this article in order to go far beyond the standardized teaching evaluations of universities to obtain real feedback from students.

This is only the first part of the contributions to the fifth Lessons Learned Conference. We anticipate that another, more extensive section will be published in the first half of 2024 in the first issue of Volume 4 of the Lessons Learned Journal. And with that, I can already invite you to the sixth Lessons Learned Conference, which will take place in summer 2024 and which we hope - like the previous conference - will have a massive impact on the development of academic teaching.

Stefan Odenbach
Lessons Learned
Vol. 2 No. 1 (2022)

Editorial

When the third Lessons Learned Conference was held at TU Dresden in fall of 2021, it was unclear not only in Dresden but at many universities in Germany what form the winter semester would take. The only certainty was that there would be no complete return to the form of teaching that had existed before the pandemic. Therefore, the teachers had the complex task of preparing for a semester that would either take place in the already known purely digital form or alternatively could be designed as a hybrid semester.

It had already become clear during the preparation of the semester that the implementation of a hybrid form would be accompanied by extreme additional technical and personnel burdens. At the same time, it was clear to all teachers that the enrollment of a further year in a purely digital form of university teaching after two years of pandemic and thus for the affected freshmen after two years of digital school structure would lead to considerable structural as well as learning and teaching difficulties.

In this area of tension and against the background that the staff members at the chairs were fatigued by the immense additional workload of the digital semesters, numerous complex and essential questions arose that had to be discussed during the conference. Accordingly, this third issue of the Lessons Learned Journal will naturally report on new developments in teaching formats, but will also address the question of the extent to which the newly developed formats from the digital era can be embedded in hybrid structures, if necessary. Thus, this issue of the journal comes very close to the original intention of the Lessons Learned Conferences and thus also of the Lessons Learned Journal, namely the question to what extent novel teaching structures can find their way into the further development of teaching after the pandemic. With this transition from purely digital structures to structures that combine presence, digital elements and novel teaching formats, the modernization process of teaching at universities will continue and be raised to a new level.

At the time of this issue's publication, most of the 2022 summer semester is behind us. After the pandemic, this was the first semester in which most universities in Germany were able to return to largely face-to-face teaching. Thus, the academic exchange between learners and between learners and teachers could be improved again. The fourth Lessons Learned Conference and thus the following issue of the Journal in fall will show for the first time to what extent the newly developed teaching formats have really found their way into regular teaching.

However, the return to face-to-face teaching in no way means that the modernization process that was initiated is over or even obsolete. On the contrary, the momentum of the past two years must now be used to vigorously drive forward, consolidate and evaluate the process of modernizing university teaching that has already begun.

With this in mind, we hope that reading the third issue of the Lessons Learned Journal will provide you with many ideas for shaping your teaching, and we look forward to the fourth Lessons Learned Conference and the fourth issue of the Journal planned for fall.

Stefan Odenbach