Vaccinated, recovered or tested (GGG) also applies to universities. Maybe now, in the last weeks of the summer semester - because every social contact is good for our students. At least in the winter semester: If the vaccination campaign continues so well and no vaccine-resistant virus variant destroys everything again, the universities will have to use all their freedoms again despite the GGG. Lecturers and students ask whether digital events can be offered again in the winter semester. Yes, if there are didactic considerations that make a digital or hybrid format in the sense of the “flipped classroom” appear appropriate. No, when it comes to convenience. Because if you want to study from a distance, please use the offers of the distance universities.
We lecturers have learned that digital formats can help us to impart knowledge and competencies and to respond to today's great heterogeneity.
Digital formats can help to challenge high-performing students more intensively.
And they can help the weaker with additional modules.
Digital courses - carefully dosed and complementary to an inspiring, community-building classroom study - will be an important element of any academic training in the future.
Even a checkerboard pattern would be helpful
If GGG applies in the winter semester - which I currently expect - further planning will concentrate on the question of what will become of the distance and area specifications. Because this directly results in usable room capacities and the possibilities for face-to-face events. Even a checkerboard pattern with 50 percent use of space would allow us to use most of the presence formats. A distance of 1.5 meters or ten square meters per person, on the other hand, is problematic because this quickly reduces our room capacity to a tenth of its original size. Politics and science must therefore advise quickly on the distance regulations. These may differ from those in schools and companies because the working conditions are not comparable.Depending on the result of these consultations, we will again allow maximum attendance at the universities in the winter semester. Also dependent on this, we would implement local testing and vaccination strategies as far as we can.
As we all know, according to the current state of science, there is no reason to deny vaccinated people access to courses.
The same applies, with restrictions, to those currently being tested.
However, there will be international students who arrive in Germany without adequate vaccinations.
Vaccination offers must be available for them on campus.
Second, there will be students who will not be vaccinated for health reasons.
Here we will resort to tests.
And third, there will be students who, for ideological reasons, do not want to be vaccinated.
We will also offer tests here, but if these are not used, we cannot provide a face-to-face offer for these people.
Large lectures or flipped classroom?
All in all, I hope that more than 80 percent of all courses will be present.
For most of these courses there will be no parallel digital or hybrid offer.
That would simply not be affordable for us universities.
It remains to be seen whether there will be a future for classic large-scale lectures post Corona.
Many university professors answer this question in the affirmative, because they serve to create a community and to introduce students to the specialist culture.
Personally, I'm not so sure about that, even though I have enjoyed reading the Introduction to Business Informatics in front of many students for many years.
But wouldn't a flipped classroom format be more efficient, in which the lecture is provided digitally and the attendance times are used for exercises and discussions?
The future will tell.
The author is President of the University of Potsdam.