Vol. 2 No. 2 (2022): Lessons Learned
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
