Abstract:

COVID19 has had a huge impact of the daily life since the beginning of 2020 worldwide. Suddenly also schools, day care for small children as well as universities faced a lockdown that is certainly unique in the history of education. Overnight thousands of lecturers had to transform their teaching from face-to-face to remote learning. Thousands of students were forced to study online. What at the beginning look like a short period of time, has now continued so that most universities still stick to online courses.

The aim of this contribution is to show how it is possible to master the switch face-to-face to Remote Learning in Higher Education in a relatively simple way and still perform high quality teaching. Based on the experiences made in the last year, this article will cover best practices concerning course design, how to foster social interactions among students, creating suitable assignments and keeping the workload at an acceptable level.

Remote learning settings require a very thoughtful and good preparation in advance of the beginning of the online course. This includes the general course design, but in particular what content is to choose and how should it be presented. Furthermore, students need social interactions. This should be taken into account already at the planning stage of an online course. Live lecturers during an online course using video conferencing tools on a regular basis (e.g. via Webex Meeting or Zoom) are very effective for this purpose. Still a lot of aspects need to be taken into account in advance in order to keep cool when technical problems occur - and they certainly will in Remote Learning settings.

All recommendations base on the experiences made by the author in 10 different online courses for students of Bachelor of Arts at a German university as well as the evaluation of these courses.

One of the main conclusions is that skills and knowledge of the teaching person should be taken into account.

Keywords:

Remote Learning, Higher Education, Best practice.