Twelve sessions, ten group presentations - and the main seminar is done.
That's how it was when Rainer Pöppinghege was studying modern history in Münster at the end of the 1980s: "Even among the history didactics experts, presentations were given, listened to, more or less discussed - until the semester was over," he says.
That was so unsatisfactory that Pöppinghege definitely wanted to do things differently: Today, the students only give short presentations in his courses.
However, they cannot avoid group work.
Organizing together and dealing with each other in such a way that everyone can keep up is not only important at school.
Group work is also essential at universities and in research in order to come up with new findings together and to stimulate discussion.
But it has to be learned and taught - especially when there are no role models, as in the last two years.
This is gradually becoming noticeable at the universities.
“We are experiencing that learning together, studying together, has become much more difficult this year.
The first-year students organize themselves less together,” reports the head of the meteorology course at the University of Hamburg.
The lecturers, on the other hand, can also make it relatively easy for themselves digitally – distribute ten group presentations using an Excel spreadsheet, and the course is complete.
You can also benefit from each other
"One doubts the system," says Neria Hotho.
The 23-year-old talks about the frustrating cooperation in her master's degree in social economics at the University of Hamburg: group members who don't keep appointments, hand in half-baked work and ultimately benefit from the work of others.
Talking to the free riders first and then consistently excluding them – that hasn't crossed her mind: "It's part of the student code that you don't tell on your fellow students," she says.
Hotho is actually a fan of group work.
You understand studies much better and more thoroughly if you can talk and argue about them with others, she thinks.
This only became clear again last semester, when she was preparing for a face-to-face seminar: The fellow student, with whom she was supposed to answer key questions about the texts, approached the texts in a completely different way, more deeply and critically - and Hotho also learned methodically from the Cooperation benefits, as she says: "Otherwise we only compare results and don't talk about the process, how we got there."
Online teaching counteracts cooperation
In the face-to-face seminar, the read texts were then discussed in the plenum.
Because everyone had read and edited the texts, the conversation was lively, and since there were to be minutes later, everyone listened.
"It was done quite cleverly, you dealt with several topics and everyone was actively discussing," says Hotho.
At least until the moment when the seminar switched back to online and the group dynamic slowed down: "That was a big downgrade," says the student.
The religious education teacher Oliver Reis from the University of Paderborn explains this with the special influence of the pandemic: "The students have learned a different social behavior," he says.
One that relies on distance and individual tasks, but is counterproductive for group work: "Group work needs face-to-face control, the others have to see who is doing what."