Sessions in: Teaching STS
H.1 Hype or sustainable change: What remains of the Digital Transformation in Higher Education?
Organizers: Yves Jeanrenaud1, Bernadette Spieler2
1: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, Germany; 2: Zurich University of Teacher Education, Switzerland
The ongoing digital transformation (Schrape 2021) has once again gained significant momentum at universities worldwide with the SARS-CoV-2 COVID-19 Corona pandemic since the summer semester of 2020, but has had before (Hofmann et al. 2021; Klös 2020). Digitization also appears to continue unabated (Kreulich et al. 2021; Dittler/Kreidl 2021) and poses a variety of challenges and change processes for different academic disciplines (Getto/Kerres 2017; Maasen/Passoth 2020; Schrape 2021, Lörz et al. 2020).
That the impact of digitization on higher education teaching (must) turn out for different disciplines is as trivial as it is central and is reflected in the numerous activities of universities and higher education organisations (cf. Hassan 2017; Barton/Müller/Seel 2019; Hochschulforum Digitalisierung 2021; Sturm/Rundnagel 2021). New curricula, methods, and adapted didactics, as well as technologies (Gaebel et al. 2021), have also brought diverse EdTech companies on the scene for years (cf. Williamson 2021).
In times of pandemic, university teaching had to become suddenly different. The short-term shift to digital teaching challenged both teachers and learners who had diverse previous exposure to digital teaching. Examples from computer science didactics and online teacher trainings here also point to a perceived opportunity to use diverse tools and online methods for versatile online teaching (Spieler, 2022a; Spieler, 2022b). At the same time, the establishment and further development of didactic knowledge about digital teaching and learning among lecturers demands for specific considerations in terms of gender in teaching (cf. Winheller/Wedl 2019). Based on these observations, the question arises whether and how the Corona pandemic specifically affected and continues to affect the digitalisation in higher education teaching with special regards to gender (cf. Bath 2015; Mauss 2017; Probstmeyer/Döring 2017; Jeanrenaud i.E.; Spieler and Both, 2021, Spieler, 2022c). And with the pandemic restrictions now being lifted nearly everywhere again, we observe a backdraw to teaching practices before 2020 in higher education institutions as well.
Hence we seek to exchange experiences and lessons learned from the past years among scholars of higher education, didacticians and lecturers alike. What can we thrive from the pandemic times and what is better to be buried in these? What has proven to be particularly valuable, for example, are tools for a short online survey such as Mentimeter, PollEverywhere, or MIRO as a documentation platform for conferences or workshops, but also seminars. Therefore, we plan this session in a world café format where participants also organize their contributions online via MIRO. For the session we group similar submitted abstracts for a first round of exchange in groups of three to six, whereas afterwards we encourage to swap tables to foster even more ideas. By this, we long to maximise not only the exchange of experience, best practice and ideas but also networking among practitioners and scholars at the same time. The discussions will also be reflected on MIRO and will be available to other conference participants. If the participation on the proposed session is to low, we switch to small group work instead of a world café.