Deutsch Digital

To date, more than 50 learning modules at levels A1 to C1 have been created and made available to members of the University of Göttingen via Stud.IP. The Deutschlernsnacks are small learning units in which grammar, learning strategies, or linguistic fields of action are taught interactively with the help of learning videos, presentations, and various exercise formats. At the same time, the Deutschlernsnacks also cover topics such as “Living and Studying in Göttingen” or " Higher Education Communication." Students can use the snacks to practice German, repeat content, and expand and deepen their knowledge. They can decide individually and flexibly where, when and how much time they want to spend learning. Teachers can link the Deutschlernsnacks to their courses via Stud.IP and, of course, actively include them in their lessons.

The Deutschlernsnacks are created with the help of students from the class ‘E-Learning im Fremdsprachenunterricht (e-learning in foreign language classes)’ and with the help of student assistants. This project not only offers German as a foreign language learners a large selection of additional material, but also allows students to gain an insight into the development of digital teaching material and the use of tools such as ILIAS, H5P and LearningApps. The learning modules are supplemented by didactic handouts and suggestions on how to work with certain learning snacks, for example in the form of project work or in the context of Flipped Classroom.

In the sense of sustainability, a selection of the Deutschlernsnacks will be provided as OER until the end of the project and made available to all interested people via OpenILIAS under the CC BY SA 4.0 License - for free use and further development.

For the development of e-exams, the Service for Digital Learning and Teaching offers a separate ILIAS platform. On this platform, question pools with over 500 different test questions have been created for all courses and all sub-levels of the Lectorate German as a Foreign Language, from which teachers can compile their exams individually. Furthermore, it is possible to constantly feed the question pool and add new exam questions. For this purpose, various training courses have been offered so that teachers know how to compile an exam from the question pools and are taught the necessary skills to create their own questions. An e-exam room is available for conducting the exams. In addition to conducting classic e-exams, this room also offers the possibility of conducting speaking exams. Switching to digital exams without paper saves resources and the question pools can be used sustainably.

The Team ‘Deutsch Digital’ has developed e-exams for German as a foreign language courses as part of the project and is a contact partner for digital test development available to colleagues. (See also: Digital Buddies).

In this practice-oriented seminar about E-Learning in foreign language courses, three perspectives are elaborated. In a first step, commonly and often used terms of the field of digital teaching and learning will be explained and discussed: What do e-learning and blended learning mean? What are learning environments and learning arrangements? What does media competence mean and is it measurable? What approaches and findings are there regarding media literacy and digital health?

Secondly, after this first theoretical grounding, we deal with terms and concepts that are especially important for the foreign language context. On the one hand, we work out under which conditions digital enrichment in foreign language teaching seems to make sense and, on the other hand, how it can be designed as an online format in a target-oriented and learner-oriented way. Here we focus on the methodology and didactics of digital teaching and learning, interlocking and application possibilities of synchronous and asynchronous teaching and learning, (meaningful) digital task formats, the use of videos and finally areas such as the activation of the learners and the aspect of social interaction.

In the last phase we reflect on the acquired knowledge and application perspectives. After receiving training on ILIAS, the students will not only create their own digital ‘Deutschlernsnack’ with ILIAS, but will also observe in the German course offered by the lecturers in parallel and take over a teaching unit in a team. The seminar covers the different stages of e-learning/e-teaching from conception to application to reflection and evaluation and enables the participants to get to know different perspectives.

Since the winter semester 2020/2021, the “Digital Buddies” have been available for employees of the Lectorate for German as a Foreign Language. The aim is to provide teachers with a contact person for questions and concerns regarding digital teaching, who can also alleviate any fears and worries they may have about this changeover. Furthermore, individual consultations are offered, ranging from the selected use of various digital media in the classroom and the use of ZOOM or Big Blue Button to electronic exams and the implementation of these via ILIAS.

Since the winter semester 2020/2021, the “Digital Buddies” have been available for employees of the Lectorate for German as a Foreign Language. The aim is to provide teachers with a contact person for questions and concerns regarding digital teaching, who can also alleviate any fears and worries they may have about this changeover. Furthermore, individual consultations are offered, ranging from the selected use of various digital media in the classroom and the use of ZOOM or Big Blue Button to electronic exams and the implementation of these via ILIAS.

The Lectorate German as a Foreign Language uses ongoing evaluations of the German as a Foreign Language courses to ensure that the wishes of the students are taken into account and that the offers of the Lectorate are constantly improved and adapted. From the most recent evaluation of the summer semester 2022, we have taken away important impulses for our course structures and learning materials..

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Research on digital teaching in the field of German as a foreign language.

In the summer semester 2020, the transition to virtual teaching had to happen immediately. In order to gain a first impression into the experiences of all parties involved (teachers and learners), various surveys were already conducted in the summer semester 2020 to be able to evaluate digital teaching at the Lectorate German as a Foreign Language. Based on this first approach, a research design was developed that enabled us to explore these new realities of teaching and learning empirically. The entire research process was guided by the central question "Which potentials and challenges are recognizable in digital teaching and learning in the area of German as a foreign language and which didactic conclusions can be derived from them? We conducted guided interviews with teachers and learners of different levels at different points in the semester about digital language teaching and learning, as well as narrative impulses about teaching and learning in the virtual space and the perceived challenges and potentials associated with it. The data is analyzed through Qualitative Content Analysis and a deductive-inductive analysis approach. The elaborated category system comprises five upper categories (course organization, methodology and didactics in synchronous teaching, understanding and use of asynchronous learning, social interactions, and individual competencies in the digital context) and the corresponding inductively developed subcategories. The study as well as a detailed presentation of the results obtained were published in September 2021 under the title “Digitale Wissensvermittlung im Bereich Deutsch als Fremdsprache” in the anthology “Hochschulen auf dem Weg zur hybriden Lehre? Forschung als Impuls für Hochschuldidaktik und Hochschulentwicklung” by the Cologne University of Technology..