Guest commentary by Thomas Bippes
06/28/2022, 00:00
Baden-Baden Published at irregular intervals goodnews4.de Contributions from guest commentators. The inner circle includes the Baden-Baden bestselling author Franz Alt and Thomas Bippes, who focuses in particular on the topics of digitization, IT and artificial intelligence.
From 1998 to 2006, Thomas Bippes was press spokesman for the parliamentary group and party of the CDU Rhineland-Palatinate and is now a professor for media and communication management at the SRH Fernhochschule – The Mobile University as well as a shareholder in an online marketing agency in Baden-Baden. The communications expert learned the tools of the trade for professional online marketing in the press and information staff of the Federal Ministry of Defence, as a speaker and press spokesman for parliamentary groups and as editor-in-chief and publisher of member magazines for institutions and associations.
Comment: Thomas Bippes Now that the corona pandemic has loosened its claws on the presence universities, it is time to take stock. How has digitization established itself in universities to support digital studying? Which instruments made sense and which didn’t? What developments can our universities continue to benefit from? Where are the opportunities of digital progress for the alma mater?
At German universities, it is evident that those who had a head start in the field of digitization, who could fall back on existing infrastructure or on learning videos and podcasts that had already been produced, got through the period without a presence reasonably well. One thing is clear: hastily acquired licenses for online lessons, the laborious construction of learning platforms – none of this can work well under pressure, especially not in a country that has a lot of catching up to do in the area of digitization across the board, and where it still does for a long time Fast internet and good mobile phone reception are not a matter of course at every “milk can”.
On the positive side, the pandemic forced an entire generation more or less to deal with digital tools. This is how the opportunity arose to get to know their advantages. We should definitely continue to use the momentum from this at the university, but also in vocational training. The pandemic acted like an overdue accelerator for the digitization of education, even if some concepts such as hybrid lectures conjured up out of a hat, i.e. the transmission of lectures via the Internet, are didactically questionable and will probably have little future. However, a university that wants to go back to pre-Corona teaching and learning formats as quickly as possible is extremely badly advised.
Flexibility is the magic word at our universities. Students can benefit greatly from being able to watch a lecture or a learning video at flexible times. It would be desirable if every student could find suitable formats at the end of the day. Incidentally, this could then also be better combined with the student job. In learning phases, it would be easier to access relevant content if it was available digitally. In fact, digitization at universities is about better dovetailing knowledge transfer and face-to-face teaching, offering more online knowledge transfer and focusing more on practice, cooperation and exchange between students in projects. This is the only way for the professor to become a “tour guide” and coach on the study path. However, this requires some willingness to rethink. I mean – the path has been mapped out and some universities in Germany are already following it successfully. The aim must be to use digital offers as a matter of course in everyday life and to link them meaningfully with the important exchange between students. At this point, not only the quality of our university education is decided, but also the competitiveness of each individual educational institution.
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