CoViD-19 and Digital Higher Education. Confusions, insights and programs
October 5, 2020

CoViD-19 and Digital Higher Education. Confusions, insights and programs

Edited by Markus Deimann, Marios Karapanos and Klaus Rummler

Please submit your abstract until 30 November 2020 at https://www.medienpaed.com/about/submissions ein. Please also find the author guidelines there.
Call for Papers as PDF

Topic

The CoViD 19 pandemic triggered an unprecedented digital transformation at universities. While previous digitization efforts - both among students and teachers - often lacked acceptance, there was no alternative to digital learning and teaching in the 2020 summer semester. In order to ensure that teaching was maintained, presence formats had to be replaced and translated digitally within a very short time and new ways of communication and collaboration had to be found. After an initial reality shock, task forces were set up, software licenses purchased and handouts for digital teaching were created and distributed. This crisis management went “astonishingly well” - as can be heard, for example, from a panel discussion held by the Hochschulforum Digitalisierung and the Bayerischer Rundfunk (see also Sommer 2020). At the same time, however, the danger of misinterpreting this crisis intervention as a blueprint for digital university teaching or even as a new normality is also pointed out. Rather, the question arises as to what positive impulses will emanate from ‘forced digitization’ for the future design of university teaching and how the experiences made in the summer semester of 2020 can serve as a guiding framework.

With this issue we would like to give space for dialogue and scientific discourse to discuss both practical and fundamental questions of digital teaching at universities.

From a media-pedagogical perspective, this concerns, for example, the assumptions of teachers, learners and other educational actors about the impact of digital technologies and media (Kerres 2020). The technology-deterministic perspective that has been implicitly taken as a basis for many decades seems to have been further strengthened by CoViD-19. Increasingly, a one-sided discussion is once again taking place in which the digitization of teaching – just like earlier innovations in educational technology, from educational television to massive open online courses – is being driven by a narrative of automation and replacement (e.g. Straubhaar 2020). However, since no application of educational technology has so far been able to bring about a lasting change of this kind for teaching and learning, a way out of this dead-end discourse is needed.

A promising approach is grounded in a move beyond old opposites (analogue vs. digital) for a critical examination of concepts such as E-Learning in terms of old and new power structures. Labelled as postdigital, this research area is highly akin to critical media education in the German speaking countries. Therefore, there is a lot of potential for theoretical refinements of media pedagogy arguments.

Furthermore, the demand for more digital higher education often collided with structures and the legal constitution of universities - even long before the CoViD 19 pandemic. Although digital teaching is permitted, an obligation for digital teaching is generally not (Faller 2015). So how can a return to the status quo ante be averted if the obligation to provide digital teaching is no longer required at some point when the pandemic is over. In addition to questions of the creditability of digital teaching (Lungershausen, Emunds, and Buß 2016), effective incentive structures (Wannemacher 2007: vom Brocke et al. 2010) must therefore also be discussed in order to maintain digital teaching as an advantageous option for teachers over analog classroom teaching even beyond the pandemic.

Contributions

This call for submissions is interested in those contributions that:

  • provide views of the current digital push at universities on a theoretically sound basis

  • conceptually outline how university teaching can be further developed digitally, drawing on well-founded positions in education, media studies, psychology or sociology

  • describe empirically (quantitative or qualitative; workshop reports) how digital university teaching was presented in the summer semester 2020 and derive implications for the future design of university teaching

  • develop realistic future visions beyond naive technology euphoria, which can serve as anchor points for reforms in university didactics and educational policy.

We invite scientists, educational practitioners and media educators, to submit abstracts of up to 800 words in electronic form by 30 Nov 2020 at: https://www.medienpaed.com/about/submissions. The editors will inform about the preliminary acceptance of the contribution by 15 Dec 2020. Full texts must be submitted by 28 Feb 2021 and will then be reviewed in a double-blind peer-review. Contributions must be written according to the instructions for manuscript submission (http://www.medienpaed.com/about/submissions#authorGuidelines).

Contributions submitted in English or German should be original and should not be under consideration elsewhere. The total character count must be less than 40.000 characters for articles or 25.000 characters for essays (including spaces, without abstract, and without references). A narrative abstract of 150–200 words briefly describes the main issues, significant results and conclusions. Contributions must be submitted with an English and German title and abstract.

Submission

Via:

https://www.medienpaed.com/about/submissions

Deadline for abstracts: 30 Nov 2020

Publication:

Special issue of the journal MedienPädagogik

Note

Please prepare full texts to timely submit upon notification. Contributions in the following form are welcome:

  • research papers (max. 40.000 characters including spaces, without abstract and bibliography)

  • essays (max. 25.000 characters including spaces, without abstract and bibliography)

Editors References

Faller, Markus. 2015. «Rechtsfragen zu digitalen Lehrformaten». 7. Hochschulforum Digitalisierung.

Fawns, Tim. 2018. «Postdigital Education in Design and Practice». Postdigital Science and Education, November. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-018-0021-8.

Kerres, Michael. 2020. «Bildung in der digitalen Welt: Über Wirkungsannahmen und die soziale Konstruktion des Digitalen». MedienPädagogik: Zeitschrift für Theorie und Praxis der Medienbildung 17 (Jahrbuch Medienpädagogik): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.21240/mpaed/jb17/2020.04.24.X.

Lungershausen, Uta, Georg Emunds, und Imke Buß. 2016. «Anrechnung virtueller Lehre auf das Lehrdeputat.» Die neue Hochschule, Nr. 4: 102–5.

Sommer, Michael. 2020. «Eine respektable Notlösung. Ergebnisse einer Umfrage zum ‹Corona-Semester›». Forschung & Lehre, Nr. 8.

Straubhaar, Thomas. 2020. «Tausende Professoren, Stundenpläne und Hörsäle – das braucht keiner mehr.» DIE WELT, 20. Juli 2020. https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/karriere/bildung/article211886035/Digitales-Studium-Corona-erwirkt-das-Ende-der-Massenuniversitaet.html.

vom Brocke, Jan, Heinz Lothar Grob, Christian Buddendick, und Alexander Simons. 2010. «Anreizsysteme für die E-Learning-Integration: Entwicklung eines Vorgehensmodells für die leistungsorientierte Budgetierung an Hochschulen». In E-Learning 2010, hrsg. v. Michael H. Breitner, Franz Lehner, Jörg Staff, und Udo Winand, 31–45. Heidelberg: Physica-Verlag.

Wannemacher, Klaus. 2007. «Anreizsysteme zur Intensivierung von E-Teaching an Hochschulen». In DeLFI 2007: 5. e-Learning Fachtagung Informatik der Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI), hrsg. v. Christian Eibl, Johannes Magenheim, Sigrid Schubert, und Martin Wessner, 161–72. Bonn: Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V.