For the first time in our university’s history, we began the 2020 summer semester with an empty campus and no face-to-face classes. If there is one thing that is more important than anything else when it comes to beating the coronavirus pandemic, it is keeping our distance from other people. But teaching goes on regardless. Just digitally. Going online has been a challenge for every member of OVGU.

How successful has the changeover been? What resources are needed? And above all which formats have proven themselves and might continue to be used by lecturers after the pandemic? We discussed these subjects with Dr. Mathias Magdowski from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology and coordinator of the E-Learning working group and came to some interim conclusions: How well has the digital summer semester worked so far and is there room for improvement?

Our guest today

Mathias Magdowski explains how well digital teaching has been implemented and which formats are used for it. He is a lecturer in the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology and is active as a coordinator for the E-Learning working group for digital teaching at the University of Magdeburg.

*the audio file is only available in German

The Podcast to Read

Intro voiceover: In die Uni reingehört. Der Podcast zur Arbeitswelt an der OVGU.

Katharina Vorwerk: And a warm welcome from me to episode 7 of our podcast! Today we will again be talking about the coronavirus, but this time in the context of the challenges, opportunities and perhaps also the limits of online teaching. My name is Katharina Vorwerk; I work in Press and PR at the University and today I will be chatting with somebody who, as the leader of the E-Learning working group, is pretty familiar with bringing student learning out of the lecture halls and seminar rooms on campus and onto the Internet. A very warm welcome to Dr. Mathias Magdowski!

Dr. Mathias Magdowski: Hello!

Vorwerk: For the very first time since it was founded, the university is beginning a semester without any students on campus. From one moment to the next, more or less, we had to switch to online teaching. Are all of the university’s lectures and seminars now, after a few weeks, running digitally? And are the tender shoots of “online teaching” flourishing?

Dr. Magdowski: From my perspective I would have to say things are going quite well. Our university has a mission statement concerning teaching, and if you read it you will find that part of it says, “we will work to continually develop our teaching and adapt it to meet the ever-changing regional and global conditions and requirements.”

Vorwerk: That sounds good.

Dr. Magdowski: And I think that in this respect we have actually been very successful. To perhaps mention one example, the university has its own video portal, the Mediasite. At present around 60 or 70 videos are uploaded to it every day, whereas before, in past semesters, it was only around five per week. And that really shows very clearly that online teaching has been embraced.

Vorwerk: It has gained momentum, yes. But how did things start out in the Faculties? Was it a bumpy start, or were there some who were in pole position, ready to go? What were the challenges that everyone faced from one day to the next?

Dr. Magdowski: I can still remember it very clearly. During the semester break I spent some time in Russia, in Kazan, to give a guest lecture; it was around the end of February, beginning of March and Germany was already seeing its first coronavirus cases. At that time, in the whole of Russia there were - I believe - four cases, two of which were in Kazan. And when I called home to my family we joked that Saxony-Anhalt was, so to speak, the “last state standing”, since there had not been a single coronavirus case and during the journey, in the airport, I hadn’t noticed anything being particularly different. And then I slowly got to thinking about it. “Hm, ok, so - how would things be? What would probably happen, if the semester actually had to take place online for the first time?”, and for our courses, and the courses that I supervise, I thought, “Well, actually it won’t be that bad. I already have a couple of videos, we have audience response quizzes, a system with customized tasks, where the students test one another. It will work well.” And then I can remember, when I had returned to Germany, we had an E-Learning working group meeting and the topic eventually came up, because by that point all of the universities in the US had in principle decided or specified that the semester would be taught online and then things developed very quickly for us too and, of course, things were very diverse. Freedom of research and teaching means that everyone can more or less do as they wish and so there was a range of responses from shocked inaction to a lot of euphoria and everything in between, I believe, and many will have also waited a little while until the semester or classes were actually supposed to have got going. But by and large, I believe that it worked quite well for everyone.

Vorwerk: Well nobody could get out of it. Nobody could say, “I’m not doing it!” But can you give us any examples of where this abrupt change from analog to digital worked especially well? Were there, to stick with the Formula 1 analogy, any digital Hamiltons and Vettels among us?

Dr. Magdowski: There are two very good examples, I think, both of which concern series of lectures: one about sustainable energy systems and the challenges of and developments in sustainability strategies in engineering by Christian Künzel and Franziska Scheffler. And there was a second great lecture series entitled “Autonomy in the Digital Age” by Dan Verständig, and what happened there that was good was that there was even a podcast produced as part of this lecture, just to think about another format, with which learners can be picked up and with which perhaps external parties can be involved too and that people can listen to more or less in passing, perhaps incidentally, and as a short, low-threshold introductory format to somehow providing some motivation, an incentive, a stimulus to perhaps go more deeply into the subject. Otherwise, of course, there is the slight problem that as outsiders we do not see so much of the teaching that is going on, because a lot of it is hidden in Moodle. Videos are protected with passwords so that nobody who is not enrolled on the course can watch at them. Which is a shame in some ways. Actually only a few things are really public or are streamed on YouTube or something like that. Up until these two series of lectures, that is.

Vorwerk: Can we say then, that in the two examples that you just mentioned, everything was done absolutely right?

Dr. Magdowski: I would say so, yes! And, of course, that is down to the fact that the people who were doing them already had a lot of experience. They had not only just begun to take an interest in digital formats, but instead had been using them for a couple of years already, and therefore had the necessary experience and involvement.

Vorwerk: Experience is the keyword for my next question. Not long ago we had the Week of Digital Teaching at OVGU for the first time with continuing training programs and a lively exchange of experiences by and for lecturers and students. You also took part with a webinar. Do we need more of this kind of thing, more opportunities to learn from one another in order to effectively improve digital teaching at the university?

Dr. Magdowski: Yes! Absolutely! We definitely need more of this kind of event. We need, as I have already said, greater visibility for this kind of teaching, so that it is not so hidden and for more networking to take place between the lecturers, including across faculties and departments and so on. That is actually already happening quite well with the E-Learning working group, but only with those lecturers who are already committed. And a really exciting idea would be, for example, to think about whether we could, perhaps, in future semesters, which hopefully will once again mainly be face-to-face, nevertheless say that we will take one week each semester to try to deliver mainly online teaching programs, so that we can train ourselves to do it and find out, among other things: What can be done in online programs like this? What will they look like? How do online lectures work and how do online seminars work? Perhaps also so that we might be able to work out and rediscover, so to speak, the value of face-to-face classes.

I recently read another really interesting and thought-provoking idea by Axel Krommer. He said, in relation to schools, but it can, of course, also be transferred to universities: “How would it be if actually everyone had always learned online and from home with online classes, online webinars and explanatory videos and so on and so forth, and then a big computer virus laid the Internet low, as well as our learning management system and the video conferencing system, and somehow we all had to come together in buildings on a campus somewhere. How would we teach and learn together then and what would that look like?” I think that is a really interesting question that is worth considering a little bit.

Vorwerk: An interesting thought experiment! But you personally are, I mean purely from the point of view of experience, an old hand, as far as the digitalization of your teaching is concerned, and put teaching content onto the Internet long before the coronavirus struck. But were there situations for you where you found you had reached your limits?

Dr. Magdowski: Of course it was helpful this semester that I and we, that we did not have to start from scratch, that we already had quite a lot of videos, that there were plenty of quiz questions, for example, that we had posed to our students previously in their lectures along the lines of “Who becomes an engineer?”, and then everyone sat there with their mobile phones and selected A, B, C or D depending on what they thought was the right answer to the question. And these kinds of questions, for example, they are really good for taking and putting on Moodle to create quizzes for the self-study phase and the self-study checks. Transferring these questions from one system to the other and checking on the details does not take up a great deal of my time, and otherwise the biggest challenges are actually, for example, for normal lecturers always copyright questions, for example where can one use which pictures and so on, as well as other legal questions such as, “what about examination law?” In any case, this semester examinations will again be a very interesting subject.

Vorwerk: Up until now we have only spoken about the problems and challenges, like just now with the legal questions, faced by the lecturers. How are the students actually getting on with online teaching? Do those young people who shop online, look for love online and are used to Instagram stories, feel confident and excited and prepared for online learning?

Dr. Magdowski: Erm...

Vorwerk: You’re laughing!

Dr. Magdowski: Well I think that there is a variety of reactions here too, but by and large it works relatively well. Nevertheless, I do not believe that this supposed generation of “digital natives”, that perhaps everyone imagines and talks about, actually exists. The students are faced with challenges just like we are, and now and again have to do battle with the technology, even though they supposedly have grown up with it. And here, perhaps, are some small examples that illustrate this: with us, the students submit answers and sometimes it doesn’t work, and then there are error reports and I say, “OK, what does the error report say? Send me a screenshot!” And then the students actually take a photo of their screen with their mobile phone and send me the photo, instead, so to speak, of simply taking a screenshot and sending that. Or if they submit the work, then typically they can only submit one file. But sometimes they might need two sheets or three to write down the solutions and that means that there are 3 photos, but they can only upload one file and then I always receive emails asking “So how do I do that? I have three files here, how can I turn them into one?” So, yes, they have to join the three photos together or paste the photos into a Word document and then turn that into a PDF file, something like that. And these are examples of the technical problems that the students also have to tackle sometimes, I think.

Vorwerk: Now we don’t just have students who are currently in the Börde region, in Lower Saxony or on the North Sea coast using our online teaching program. Is there any knowledge, or do you have any sort of feedback about whether our international students, who might be sitting at computers in India or China at the moment, are able to access our online programs?

Dr. Magdowski: I myself have a seminar this semester with our international Master’s students. It covers the principles of scientific work and writing, and as a kind of introduction to the course and to help people get to know one another I asked them all to introduce themselves briefly in the Moodle forum: who they are, where they come from, what, perhaps, they expect from this course in terms of content, and what they hope to get out of it, and please also to send a photograph of their current home office working environment or their workstation, or if that is too personal for them then they could also just send a view out of their window or from the balcony or whatever, and so now thirty students have briefly introduced themselves and submitted photos of their workstation and their working environment, which was actually very, very interesting and it was also a nice way of showing the other students that they are all one of many others on the course. And in this way they got to know the others a little bit and did not sink into complete anonymity in a gray mass of students. And of course it was possible to see that a not inconsiderable number of the students were actually still in their home country and, of course, for example were also dealing with being in a different time zone. And so we realized that it is better to make asynchronous teaching formats available, in other words pre-produced videos, that the students can watch at any time, anywhere, because it is really difficult, if we put on a live online lecture in the afternoon, let’s say at 5 pm or 3 pm, then in India, for example, it is already very late at night, and it can be difficult for people to participate. Quite apart from the possibility that the Internet connection might not be all that good, so then that allows them to - I don't know - download a pre-produced video for two hours and nevertheless spend just 10 minutes watching it, without the sound or the image disappearing every 10 seconds, which is really annoying.

Vorwerk: You have just given us an example of how you tried, over great distances, to create a feeling of togetherness, a group. That is probably not all that easy with online teaching. What aspects of teaching do you think are lost in Zoom conferences in comparison with the traditional seminar in Building 5? Or is nothing lost? Do they add anything?

Dr. Magdowski: Well, of course a little bit of the small talk is lost that one might enjoy before a lecture with the students and, of course, the really quick interactions and low-threshold communication are lost. In my tutorials, something that I really like to do is have the students do calculations on the board or I present solutions to them and then I don’t look at the board at all, or at most just with half an eye, and instead I look into the room at the students, and it is immediately clear from their faces if somehow something is not clear on the board or if they have not understood something, and then I can immediately ask: “What wasn’t clear?” And I cannot do that now. Somehow it is really hard to look 30 people in the face at the same time on Zoom and see that there has been a misunderstanding, or that something isn’t clear, and try to get to the bottom of the problem right away.

Vorwerk: Now teaching from your kitchen table at home might sometimes be quite convenient, which is why at this point I’m allowing myself to ask this question: Have you ever delivered an online lecture in your jogging bottoms?

Dr. Magdowksi: Not an online lecture, but I have made the occasional explanatory video, which I actually usually do on an evening... There are people who always record their videos in front of an audience, because they are simply more “present” if they do. That doesn’t work for me, I much prefer to record them at home in peace and so I actually sit down on an evening in very comfortable clothing and record the odd explanatory video on my laptop.

Vorwerk: If one could really do something wrong in online teaching, what, in your view, would be the worst-case scenario? In other words, what should teachers absolutely avoid?

Dr. Magdowski: So, a couple of years ago I designed an online course for the cooperation with the Russian university that I mentioned earlier, in Kazan, and it was about getting the students to simulate something in a program and so we produced explanatory videos for it about how to start the program, how to create the model and so on and so forth, and then a tutorial about how to install it and also got a student in Germany to look at everything and test it, and then we sent the content to Russia - and it did not work! And the students simply could not install this program or use it for simulations and kept getting peculiar error messages that we could not understand from here and it really took ages, we had no idea, several weeks were wasted until we found the cause. It turned out that the Russian students - how could it have been otherwise? - naturally used Cyrillic letters in their Windows login names and that caused this program to consistently crash. That means, they could - I mean as soon as they opened the program, it always went wrong. And they were unable to do a single simulation, not follow the simplest example and until we had finally identified the problem and consulted with the manufacturer and somehow the problem was solved, the time for this course had, of course, long passed, and that was really a total worst-case scenario. But it is often the case that challenges of this nature only arise and become visible during the process.

Vorwerk: So your advice to lecturers would be that things don’t work by themselves and that they shouldn’t get started on planning 5 minutes before the lecture.

Dr. Magdowski: Yes! Prepare as well as possible, make sure that you think things through, and also like...

Vorwerk: Plan B!

Dr. Magdowski: Exactly, as Rudi Karrell said: “If you want to pull something from up your sleeve, then you have to have it up there in the first place.” It's a good idea to have a backup solution available in the background and for me, you will also find out for yourself that even if you’re using Zoom for the fifth time or more, you will somehow always find a button that gives you a little bit more functionality and you can adjust colors and delete and save things again quickly and that’s how it is... when I look back at my first explanatory videos I sometimes think: “OK, you really could have done that better!” But no matter!

Vorwerk: In the E-Learning working group that you lead, there are many university members who are committed to supporting and advancing digital teaching on campus. For which specific problems do you offer solutions or, to put it another way: with which questions can lecturers turn to the working group?

Dr. Magdowksi: So, in recent years in the working group we have gathered together a collection of tools and best practice examples, and now, during the coronavirus crisis expanded that again a little, to include a Wiki, where everyone can participate, which is also a similar collection for both synchronous and asynchronous online things - such as how best to record explanatory videos, and ideas too for electronic examinations. We have set up a ticket system with two email addresses: and onlineteaching@ovgu.de, one for the German-speaking and one for the English-speaking staff, where they can approach us with questions and then on the basis of our experience and the knowledge that can be found in the Wikis... the E-Learning working group also has a Moodle course for coordination that is saved there and that actually works quite well. With this ticket system, the biggest peak of inquiries was actually between April 1 and the Easter weekend, when the what you might call “hot phase” was, when it was clear that “OK, now we really will have to put everything online”. And so over the course of time there were a couple of funny or absurd questions. The students turned to these email addresses and, for example, started asking where they could register for certain courses. One student, an international student, wrote, at 8 o’clock in the morning that he actually had an online lecture at 7 o’clock, by Zoom, where could he find the access code for this meeting? “Well we don’t know that kind of thing - please contact your lecturer!” And otherwise there were, of course, a large number of questions about Zoom and how it works and how lecturers could invite their students, and that kind of thing.

Vorwerk: Is there actually a kind of gold standard for digital teaching, something like a generally valid recommendation, a key that fits every door?

Dr. Magdowski: For certain there isn't really anything like that because... otherwise the world would be too simple. I think that what always helps is to involve the students as much as possible, to continuously ask them for feedback and to continuously give them feedback too. Let the students do as much as possible themselves, of course, test things out for themselves, in other words support active learning and otherwise, I think that a saying that goes well here is that good teaching always happens when both the learners and the teachers step out of their comfort zones and every now and again try a few new things and do not, so to speak, just sit back and relax. This is true of both online and face-to-face teaching.

Vorwerk: Even if the calls to digitize more aspects of university teaching are nothing new, in recent weeks, or now in our time, one might the impression that the Coronavirus crisis has provided the critical impetus, and not only at OVGU, to engage with digital teaching; that there is no turning back. How can we continue along this path that we have embarked upon? How can we make more use of the lessons we have learned?

Dr. Magdowski: Well I think that in future we will need even more of these dedicated support structures, in other words people who simply know what they are doing in terms of online teaching, to whom we can turn and say: “I want to do x, y and z, I would like to achieve such and such an educational goal, how can I best go about it with this method or that online tool?” Equally, there needs to be a sustainable strategy from the university management to say that in future we will rely more heavily on online teaching, in other words we will still have face-to-face teaching, but online teaching too, or blended learning. Taking the best from both worlds should be an integral part of our approach. Of course online teaching, just like face-to-face teaching, needs a good library, a good knowledge database in the background, online learning of course also needs efficient IT in the background and also a legal contact or adviser, and also the term “data protection”, which I’m mentioning for the first time in this podcast. Yes, there too, lecturers would often like a reliable and quick statement about how best to handle a particular issue. These are things, I think, that could support lecturers who would like to commit to online formats. And yes, otherwise I too do not want to put absolutely everything online, but if we do face-to-face teaching, then we should value it a bit more, perhaps, and use it for the most useful formats, in other words for interaction with the students and for discussing and solving complex problems and not necessarily just for pure knowledge transfer, because that can now, I think, be done quite well online alone.

Vorwerk: Before our discussion comes to an end, let us turn to our popular feature, “Long story short”. I will start you off with three sentences and I would like you to spontaneously complete them. Ready? If all of the resources I could wish for were available to me, then I would like the following for digital teaching at the University of Magdeburg...

Dr. Magdowksi: ...more appreciation and actually something like digital devices for all students, above all for those who cannot afford them from home.

Vorwerk: Regarding digital teaching at the university, the coronavirus crisis has...

Dr. Magdowksi: ...accelerated things to an unbelievable extent. So if we were to use the analogy of a cyclist: we have now rolled down the ramp from the Mittelland canal and have really picked up speed ,and now we have to ask whether we are rolling on a nice, smooth asphalt track and if we can, so to speak, keep up the pace or whether there is a cobbled street waiting at the bottom of the ramp with tight bends and trees to crash into.

Vorwerk: A very nice image! Digital teaching formats that should be kept after the crisis include...

Dr. Magdowski: ...explanatory videos, because they allow the students to learn, irrespective of time or place and they can be watched at any time, rewound at their own pace if they haven’t understood something. Of course, there is the risk that some will say: “OK, then the students will all just look at the videos a couple of days before the exam, at double speed.” But that risk was actually always there before too with books and lecture notes.

Vorwerk: So that’s all for today. Thank you very much for our chat and, of course, for your dedication to helping digital teaching at the university progress, too. And you, on your mobile devices, or wherever you were listening, thank you for tuning in too. If you have any suggested topics for our podcast series, would like to give us some feedback, be it critical or positive, then just drop us an email to And with this edition of our internal podcast, it’s time for the summer break, so goodbye for now until October! However, our next science podcast will be available in July, in which we look into what connects the smell of vanilla with the urge to buy things. Until then! Take care and stay healthy!

Intro voiceover: In die Uni reingehört. Der Podcast zur Arbeitswelt an der OVGU.