Our university management demanded that all departments provide online teaching. We had one week to put all courses online and all teaching and learning should take place online. Lectures, seminars, group work, tutoring, coaching, learning support, presentations, written work, examinations everything would take place online. Fortunately, some courses already had a working online environment, so we didn’t have to reinvent everything. But some lecturers needed help so that they would not hold their three-hour lecture in sync, but instead they could create sequences of asynchronous tasks for the students followed by discussions in forums as well as synchronous Q&A or tutoring online sessions for instance.
My university hast 12’000 students and 8 departments and about 3’500 employees in total. The departments are all different sizes. My department of social work is one of the smaller ones. We have about 1000 students and 130 employees. My e-learning team consists in 2 people, my colleague, a part-time assistant and myself.

During this setup week and the following two weeks of installment and first attempts we were extremely challenged and busy coaching faculty and staff with LMS and Videoconferencing questions. We would have been overwhelmed if we did not have our colleagues from the other departments. We started to meet in videoconferences every day with the IT department to discuss challenges and possibilities to work online and to present and exchange resources. It was a great collaboration. The bigger departments with more staff provided the smaller ones with very few staff with tutorials and other materials to use in our own environment. We were allowed to use their supporting sites and provided the link to the Q&A forums we had installed in our department to We learned what other departments struggled with or which solution they had found for a problem we also had to face. On the other hand we were able to share our webinar recordings or other resources we used to work with before the crisis. It was a great experience!

We got good feedback from our lecturers and teaching staff as well as from our administrators.

One of the best ideas is café digital, a daily online-meeting  in the evening for all teachers and elearning professionals of our institution and department to discuss a certain question or to simply chat for a moment in order to see how things went. We regularly have visitors stepping by to say hi, hear how their peers were or looking for an answer to a certain question.

In the meantime things are calmer. I think we head into a new phase now: Teachers and students are now working, the «new normal» has begun, and with this other questions emerge. They are busy to learn how to use all those new tools and environments, how to link synchronous meetings and asynchronous sequences. We got to use the Zoom videoconferencing platform now for instance, a great tool with bigger privacy issues. So now we will have to figure out how to solve those issues for students and staff. Here the data analytic side of the medal meets data protection issues.

Privacy issues now!

Interestingly our students discover data protection right now with Zoom while they never asked what Facebook would do with their data or, Instagram or Google, the search engine so far. Privacy violation through those corporate is not new, since 2016 and Trumps’ election we know for sure that our very own data is sold to the highest bidder and Facebook would have no problem to distribute fake news to your account. But it is today that we get more and more emails by rightly concerned students and faculty. How come?

For all the difficulties and tragedies that this crisis is causing – I do not want to gloss over anything! – we will really learn a lot. Suddenly people are thinking about what being online all the time does to them, what the tools do and what data is transmitted to whom. Suddenly we all become aware of the questions we have neglected so far, even though the IT managers had always warned us. Suddenly the students are calling for data protection, whereas previously they were more likely to complain if they were not allowed to do something out of GDPD considerations. In this way, the crisis becomes a catalyst for problems that we had previously put off. I hope that we will continue to think and that the world after the crisis will be a better one.

Immediate response to the crisis

Besides all the events that came over us at breathtaking speed, we immediately had to switch to online teaching. You have to imagine that our bachelor’s programme was almost exclusively face-to-face teaching. So we – and with us about 100 teachers with very different experience in digital education – had to switch from one day to the next. This caused – to put it mildly – a lot of stress, in addition to all the other personal burdens of illness and the threat of infection.
The efforts of the IT department, for example, illustrate well how quickly and comprehensively the changes were implemented: With our Moodle, the first step was to scale the server capacity from 2,000 students at a time to 4,000, and in a further step Moodle was upgraded to three new instances with a total capacity of 12,000 students at a time. At the same time, new tools were introduced, such as the video conferencing platform Zoom and others. Both students and lecturers had to adapt to new forms of exchange within a very short time. It was also a huge change for the students, as they had to adapt various new ways of working in all the courses they attended at the same time. We didn’t have time to work out a concept to harmonise the working methods in the modules, to make recommendations to all lecturers on how best to make the change, so that it could be done roughly uniformly to relieve the students.

Missed topics on IDEL

It was four hard weeks, which cost me a whole topic (Data Analysis) and during which I could no longer perform my usual rhythm in the IDEL module. Already in the previous topic ‘Open everything’ I had to cut back, although I am very interested in the topic and I am especially attached to it, because this openness is exactly what fascinated me about the Internet and still does, even though a lot has changed in the last years with the big tech companies. I would have loved to discuss some critical approaches in depth with my felow students. Nevertheless, I was not able to participate in the discussions and activities as I would have liked to, not to mention my blog, which I wanted to supplement with missing posts anyway.
So Corona has set me back a lot and I hope that this does not affect my performance too much. Nevertheless, I’d like to catch up on the missed topics and have a closer look at and try out some interesting experiences like the Twitter activity in particular.