Educational Impulses for Redesigning (Online) Teaching in the Post-Pandemic World

A Discussion and Evaluation of Lessons Learned

Abstract

This article reflects on the challenge of online teaching from the perspective of media didactics, a perspective that gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic. The qualitative-reconstructive study reflects on 65 multidisciplinary papers written during the pandemic. Together, these studies empirically examine the challenges, achievements, and failures of the first large-scale experiment in university teaching during that time and include quantitative empirical studies and qualitative first-hand accounts from university lectures that document how scholars adapted their courses from on-campus teaching to online teaching. Many approaches are innovative and creative, while some are not really new, at least from the perspective of media education. Still, many teachers with limited exposure to media-based or online teaching pre-pandemic broke new ground in their individual teaching. Of course, learning is an individual process. Nevertheless, expectations that university teaching would be fundamentally redesigned were almost inevitably destined for disappointment due to the pandemic’s suddenness, a lack of didactic knowledge, technical and organizational hurdles, and various other individual challenges. It is now clear that the emergency online semesters have permanently changed university teaching. Learning from both successes and failures, this article proposes the design and development of good (online) teaching for post-pandemic times. It bases its proposals on the documented experiences of teachers, on empirical data, and on three practical examples.