Start of the DUTy Lecture Series in the winter semester 2022/23Lecture on ‘Myths & realities of digital teaching’ by Prof Dr Jörn Loviscach on Lecture2Go

5 December 2022

Photo: UHH/Lecture2go

‘I hope I'm being provocative.’ - Prof. Dr Jörn Loviscach began his lecture on the myths and realities of digital teaching on 11 October 2022 with this sentence. This also marked the start of the DUTy Lecture Series in the winter semester 2022/23, a joint lecture series by the DDLitLab and HUL in which university didactic issues are discussed in the context of digitalisation.

Prof Dr Jörn Loviscach is not only Professor of Engineering Mathematics and Computer Engineering, but also Deputy Editor-in-Chief at c't Magazin für Computertechnik. He has also been involved in digital teaching for over 20 years. It is important to him to look at the hopes and expectations of digital teaching as well as the limits and hurdles. After all, despite thousands of maths videos on YouTube, school leavers often lack the necessary maths skills for their studies. Loviscach asks: ‘What's going wrong?’.

In many illustrative examples, it becomes clear how expectations of teaching and learning in the digital world diverge from reality. In his deliberately provocative manner, Prof Loviscach puts forward three theses: 1) ‘We don't really know how things could be better’, 2) ‘We are not implementing known improvements’ and 3) ‘We are only scratching the surface’. Here, too, he uses many examples to encourage reflection and discussion about digital teaching. If, for example, ‘the old is replicated with the new’, many opportunities of the new technology are missed on the one hand, but functions that cannot be fulfilled with the new are also overlooked: In contrast to a freely available online lecture, it is not at all easy for students to leave their seats in a lecture theatre.

Towards the end of the lecture, Loviscach comes to the conclusion that it is not the technology that is decisive for learning success, but aspects such as conscientiousness, need for cognition, the environment or the financial situation. He argues in favour of putting oneself in the students' shoes instead of starting from one's own learning experiences: Perhaps you feel similarly out of place in a maths lecture as he himself used to feel in PE class? Perhaps the invitation to ask a question in an online forum is as absurd for you as attending a Helene Fischer concert is for Mr Loviscach?

You can watch the recording of this content-rich lecture in the following video (German):

On 13 December 2022 at 4 p.m., Prof. Dr Christian Kohls (Professor of Computer Science, Socio-Technical Systems, Cologne University of Applied Sciences) will discuss the ‘Design of hybrid learning spaces’ in the second lecture in the series. Participation is possible on site at Jungiusstraße 11 and online via Zoom.

Upcoming events

• 13.12.2022 - 16.00-18.00 Designing hybrid learning spaces (hybrid) - Prof. Dr Christian Kohls, Professor of Computer Science, Socio-Technical Systems, Cologne University of Applied Sciences
• 10.01.2023 - 16.00-18.00 Studying in the digital world (hybrid) - Prof. Dr Sandra Hofhues, Professor of Media Didactics, FernUniversität Hagen