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My name is Gerhard Thiel, and I'm a professor in the Department of Biology. This is a major event with first-semester students. There are over a hundred and seventy students in there.

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They listen to a lecture twice a week, then have exercises in two groups. They then go to the laboratory and work with a microscope, so it's really hands-on.

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The second form of teaching is both for the elective module in the Bachelor's degree program and the Master's program.

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They are really combinations of lectures, a week of intensive lectures with afternoon exercises on the things

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that were discussed in the lecture. And then comes the proper laboratory work, so not only in the teaching laboratory

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but also in the working group's laboratory on equipment that we also use for research.

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When the crisis started and the first measures took effect in Germany, we had exactly a week and a half's time

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to design an online module – for undergraduate students, the module is this combination of lecture and practical laboratory work.

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That was relatively short notice, and we did it well.

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So basically the teaching is digital, but there are also smaller slots where a small number of students come to the laboratory and see it for themselves. What they would have spent four weeks doing every day in the laboratory before has now been greatly reduced.

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So the feedback from the undergraduate students was very positive. They were simply happy to be able to do anything.

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It wasn't at all clear at the time whether they would even be able to study or do anything. That was before Easter.

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So we have our module slots, which are not in the semester but actually in the semester holidays, which has something to do with the fact that otherwise we would collide somewhat with other colleagues in the laboratories.

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What led me to do this is that it is actually already my form of questioning students. To me it's not just about the questioning. But someone who only knows but doesn't understand what they have done, what they have learnt, and is not capable of only going from A to B but not via C,

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that's not what we want to hear from our students. So from that point of view, from the mentality of the exams, it's not really that much different from what we used to do in the lecture hall.

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The students are given a number of questions, and these questions are all transfer questions,

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and although it can help to quickly have a look at Wikipedia,

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it won't answer the question. You have to understand what the purpose of the question is and how to answer it.

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I believe that the people who set the exam should also be the ones to mark it.

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So you can't get them to sit the exam and afterwards have a student or an assistant look at it to see if it has the right answer,

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that is, to see if the result is correct.

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I believe the exam must reflect what was presented in the lecture and exercise.

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So it's not a question of listening to the exception of the exception of the exception, but of questioning, directly or indirectly,

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the messages that were to be disseminated in the lectures, in the exam.

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I spoke about this in a meeting with our President, Mrs. Brühl. We were also talking about corona and how to set up the teaching. So I said that I was planning to write a kind of open-book exam. At the time I hadn't even heard the term. And I said my colleagues had warned me that it probably wasn't yet legally safeguarded,

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and Mrs. Brühl said, "We are teaching adults here, and we assume that they are not planning to deceive, but want to handle things responsibly. You go ahead and do it."

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The lesson to learn is that it often helps to do things and act under time pressure. Because when you realise how much talking there is about possible forms and how to do everything better and do everything right and everything, then it's often pouring a little water into wine.

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I think when you have to make a decision and say I've now got XY amount of time to implement it,

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then you're simply under pressure and you've just got to get on with it.

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You just have to make decisions. Whether or not this is all backed up by paragraphs isn't that important at the moment.

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So Helmut Schmidt University's flood behaviour is probably also a very good signpost in teaching, or in digital teaching.