“I Can Do This – Better Than I Thought” – Instructors’ Experiences of The Digital Summer Term 2020

Abstract

With the Covid-19-induced situation in the summer term 2020, instructors at campus universities were confronted with the need to radically modify their face-to-face teaching practices. Switching to teaching fully online, they needed to cope with an oftentimes little chartered pedagogical territory, adapt to online distance education practices and do so in a very short time. As part of an institutional evaluation of the summer term, this study draws on the responses of n = 29 instructors who reported zero years of prior experience with digital teaching at the outset of the summer term at one German university. It provides evidence on the kinds of tools that they used in their teaching, the most important learning experiences they identified and the elements they would like to modify in their future teaching.