The main thing is digital!

Under the motto "Is 'digital' the be-all and end-all?!" the 17th Workshops on E-Learning (WeL) took place at the University of Applied Sciences for Technology, Business, and Culture in Leipzig in late 2019. One of the goals was to address the question of “whether digitization should be implemented across the board at any cost and whether teaching should be entirely technology-supported.”

Keynote

Christiane Arndt from the Hamburg University of Technology delivered the keynote address at the Workshops on E-Learning. She spoke about the “BRIDGING” project , which examines the transfer of digital higher education concepts into academic disciplines from both a content-based and a process-oriented perspective.

Workshop Sessions

The workshop sessions then began with the presentation “Online Placement Tests in Foreign Languages” by Dr. Antje Tober and Michaela Heidig. They presented the tandem project “Online Language Placement (OLP),” with a focus on OPAL/ONYX online placement tests for the foreign languages English and German.

Other topics included: learning analytics, digital competencies, blended learning approaches, opportunities in technology-enhanced teaching, learning cultures, item pool management, digitized measurement technology labs, and much more.

Presentations

The following presentations were given by faculty and staff from Zittau/Görlitz University of Applied Sciences:

• Online Placement Tests in Foreign Languages
• The Importance of “Traditional” Skills in the Digital Transformation
• thermoSOL—A Blended-Learning Approach to Support Self-Directed Learning Processes in STEM
• “Is Digital Good? Yes, but!”—Opportunities for Technology-Enhanced Teaching Using the Example of the Integrated Model of Text and Image Comprehension
  
  

A “comprehensive and complete digitization of teaching at any cost”—as the participants agreed—is, of course, not the solution. Rather, it is important for instructors to structure information and guide the learning process in such a way that learning can take place as effectively and efficiently as possible.