See “Page URL” field below…Peter Purgathofer and Janis Lena Meißner from the Human-Computer Interaction Group at TU Wien Informatics have expertly translated their teaching methods to the digital world. In 2021, Peter Purgathofer and his team received an Award of Distinction by the Ars Docendi (Austrian State Prize for Good Teaching) in the category Methods of Distance Learning and their Sustainable Use.

In a short film by Christian Lendl, TU Wien Informatics alumni, filmmaker, and media engineer from Vienna, they talk about the transformation process, its challenges and benefits.

Designing a new format

Transferring lectures usually designed for large auditoriums into online courses is one of the significant teaching challenges lecturers faced during the pandemic. A talk ‘into the black box’ is not enough to captivate students at home in front of their laptops. Peter Purgathofer and Janis Lena Meißner have developed a new concept: They reduce the thematic introduction to 30-45 minutes, accompanied with text, pictures, and videos. Students are required to create content summaries to pick up the lecture material – and are free to choose their preferred working method, from infographics to plain text.

The second half of the lecture consists of a lengthy discussion with experts from the respective fields. An important finding was that discussions work far better online than in large lecture halls: The exchange is livelier because of the lower threshold to ask questions online. Moreover, Purgathofer and Meißner noticed that the quality of questions increases, among others, due to the written format.