The Future of Digital Learning in Universities

A Personal Perspective

By Günter Bischof

The University of New Orleans is home to the Austrian Marshall Plan Center for European Studies (Center Austria).
© UNIVERSITY OF NEW ORLEANS

In late February 2020, I flew from New Orleans via New York to Zurich to start a semester as a guest professor at the University of Innsbruck. Even though first scares about COVID-19 could be heard from Wuhan in China, it did not frighten travelers like me yet in the U.S. and in Europe, even though Mardi Gras had just ended when I left and later on turned out to be a “super spreader event.” I met my students during the first week of March and it looked like a normal semester. Then all hell broke loose. On March 13, the governor of the Tirol region ordered a strict quarantine for his province since some ski resorts in the Arlberg region (Ischgl and St. Anton) had also acted as “super spreaders” (“Virenschleudern” they were called in German), they were totally closed down and isolated. I was stuck in my apartment in Innsbruck for weeks on end it seemed. The University of Innsbruck quickly closed its buildings, shut down the entire lecture and moved to “distance learning” education.

I had never taught digitally before and no one was around to instruct me in the basics. Some of my colleagues taught on Adobe Connect from home. I had no idea how to do that. Since I lived close to the university’s main campus and managed to get an electronic key the last second before my building was shut down, I actually went to campus to tape my Survey in U.S. History lectures. The department secretary instructed me in the fundamentals of the technology and off I went taping lectures. I lectured in a huge lecture hall designed for ca. 300 students without an audience. That was creepy. In my first attempt of the lecture on “Reconstruction of the South after the Civil War” I had forgotten to turn on the microphone, so I had to tape my 1½ hour lecture again since students could not hear me. Such are the pitfalls in digital education for the uninitiated. But the University of Innsbruck in a number of its larger classrooms had installed an excellent system of taping lectures for students who studied at off-campus sites but were enrolled in Innsbruck. The taped lectures were automatically uploaded to their teaching platform Olat, where students could access them on their own schedule.

Since I had plenty of time to grade papers I assigned the students four short interpretive papers on documents such as Henry Luce’s “American Century” essay, or M.L. King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” They had the option of a midterm exam and then a final exam, all of which were essays, too. I’d say the students learned as much in this course and in this format as my American students did in a regular setting. Lectures, tests and papers were all in English and students handled their assignments skillfully (a high school teacher friend told me that Austrian high schoolers and university students talk and write English so well because they watch so many Netflix movies in English (call them the “Netflix Generation”).

In my seminar “The U.S. in World War II” students had to write a 25-page seminar paper and there was much back and forth on e-mail about their paper topics and available sources. I only had to cancel the meetings where they would have presented their papers. They had all gone home to Germany, the South Tyrol (Italy), Vorarlberg and wherever home was and did not have library resources available. The University of Innsbruck Library opened on a reduced schedule in early May again. So one of my jobs while sitting in my apartment became to point out digital source collections to them, of which there are many, as I myself discovered. This turned out to be a rewarding exercise.

I had a hard time getting back to the U.S. Attempts to fly home early failed since the Swiss border was closed and technically I was not supposed to leave Innsbruck. I returned home in late May (as had been planned all along) on flights from Vienna to Amsterdam to Atlanta and on to New Orleans. The first sign that things were different in the U.S. came in the Atlanta airport, where a lot of people did not wear face masks. In Austria, on public trains, buses, and the Vienna subway, everyone wore face masks, almost religiously. The almost empty airports were eerie sights.

After my return I prepared for my fall courses here at the University of New Orleans (UNO). I taught my lecture course with 20 people online via Zoom. My eleven seminar students I asked whether they want to meet. They were divided down the middle between online teaching and in-class meetings. So it was both – what they call a “hybrid course.” Since one of the rules dictates that no more than ten people can meet on campus at any one time, I had to divide up my in-class groups into two pods, which complicated matters. Classes started August 18 and over the course of the semester I had to handle the technical challenges (younger colleagues find the online challenges less daunting).

What have I learned? If it needs to be done online, I can do it, too. I’m not so sure what students think. Judging from how they gathered along the Inn River in Innsbruck after quarantine restrictions were eased in Austria and in Tirol, they quickly came out to meet socially without much distancing or face masks. This will be a trend with young people anywhere. I have also learned that university administrators don’t do much to see that their faculty gets instruction in the new technologies – we have to learn it on our own or through family help. I suppose administrators were as surprised by the virus and its challenges as faculty and students, so they were groping in the dark. However, administrators like to brag to the outside world how much their faculty has mastered the new technologies and how well distance learning is going.

What will be the future of digital learning? People quickly get bored from too many Zoom meetings. This will happen to faculty and students, too. So I suspect faculty and students can’t wait for the day when university (and school) instruction returns to the classroom with the genuine give and take of questioning and discussion and an argumentative learning environment. The investment in high tech classrooms, as I’ve encountered them in Innsbruck, will continue to be useful for off-campus instruction. Poor American public universities like the University of New Orleans will probably not find the means to invest in such high tech classrooms and will muddle through with what they have.

Günter Bischof, Ph.D., is the Marshall Plan Chair of History and the Director of Center Austria at the University of New Orleans. He is a specialist in the Cold War and U.S. – Austrian relations.

For more information:

Center Austria - www.centeraustria.org