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
