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My name is Gerhard Thiel, I'm a professor in the Department of Biology, and I teach the anatomy of plants

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o undergraduate students. In higher semesters, our field is biophysics. "How is teaching structured in non-Corona times?"

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hey are actually two different, let us say, forms of organisation. There is one major event with undergraduate students, which has over 170 students.

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They listen to a lecture twice a week, then have an exercise in two groups. They then go to the laboratory and work with a microscope,

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so they are really busy manually doing plant cross-sections, looking at them under a microscope and then drawing them.

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The second form of teaching, both for the elective module for the Bachelor's degree and the Master's degree, consists really of combination of lectures,

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a week of intensive lectures with afternoon exercises on the things we discussed in the lecture.

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UAnd then comes the proper practical laboratory work, so not only in the teaching laboratory but also in the working group's laboratory

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n equipment that we also use for research. The students then work on larger or smaller research projects. "What were the key challenges in the digital transition?"

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Well, the main challenge really was that we had to do it all with a week and a half's warning. When the whole crisis started

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and the first measures took effect in Germany, we had exactly a week and a half's time to design an online module –

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undergraduate students, the module is this combination of lecture and practical laboratory work. That was relatively short notice, and we did it well. "How does teaching currently take place in Corona times?"

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So we're doing what we had already tried for the Bachelor's module, we're now doing for the Master's module, which takes place in September and last for six weeks. And we mix that with small groups of students coming to the laboratory for one or two days

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and then really doing something practical. This means that what they are now doing in the exercise or / we film short videos of the experiments. So what they see in the videos or what they get from the internet or from books,

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they will have seen at least once and also have done it themselves at least once.

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

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but that's just the way it is at the moment. And I think a major disadvantage,

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well, it's a disadvantage, but you can compensate for it by, well, let's just say that the intellectual part is more the evaluation of data,

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and we're doing much more of that now, more intensively than we were doing before because we simply have more time for it.

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So it's shifting a little bit more. And I don't think it's going to be all that bad. "What is the feedback from students?" So the initial feedback from the undergraduate students was very positive.

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They were just happy to be doing anything at all, it really wasn't clear at the time whether they would even be able to study or do anything, that was before Easter. So we have our module slots, which are not in the semester but actually in the semester holidays which is to do with the fact that otherwise we would simply collide somewhat with other colleagues in the laboratories.

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So were were already working on this module before the semester had even started. And the students were just happy that they hadn't lost the semester.

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The feedback was extremely positive. And quite a few of the students came to us in the laboratory wanting to do a Bachelor's thesis. People only want to do this if the material was interesting in some way and they enjoyed the personal interaction, even if it was now only digital, and they think that they will be able to work with the people.

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Because, as I said, we started before the whole thing, the whole Zoom tsunami, took off, so we had to – let's say, we made do by discussing some PowerPoint slides and then sent them out.

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It was all quite rudimentary. So we still had relatively little contact with the students. The communication was more using the internet, so using emails than, well, now we have different technology at hand that we know how to use and where we can now interact more with the students. So of course, we'll now include that in the event, the next one to take place.

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"Why did you decide to do an 'open book exam'?" Well, to begin with we had, I think, 22 students, and interviewing and questioning,

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effectively doing an oral exam with 22 students via Skype, well, it just wasn't an option. But the actual – let's say what made me do it like this is that it is actually also my way of questioning students, to me it's not about the questioning.

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Well, 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, that's not what we want to hear from our students.

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

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"What is an Open Book exam like?" Well, the structure is the students are given a certain number of questions, and these questions are all transfer questions.

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And, well, quickly having a look at Wikipedia

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can help to get you on your feet,

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but 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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And so there were, I think, a number of seven, eight questions in which the students also had to – I mean, of course it benefits us in biophysics if you also have to occasionally do some calculations where not only the result counts,

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but the way you get to it does as well. And what we have now done differently, or what I have done differently from the normal exams in the course room is that we have set them up

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so that they had exactly an hour's time, and at the end of the hour had to email them back to us. In other words, they were under a certain amount of time pressure,

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but there was also enough time to answer all the questions.

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In other words, if you start by spending ten minutes rifling around and making phone calls and asking

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how to do it, then you're also losing time and you may have solved one task better, but you haven't done the other ones..

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So it's a bit of a balancing act with

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the amount of time you have.

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Well, I think there was enough time to answer the questions, but then again you didn't have time to lose.

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"What are conditions of success for the successful implementation of open book exams on the part of instructors?" 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 the right answer is there,

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that is, to see if the end result is correct.

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But it has to be looked at by someone who thought up the question and, let's say, understands the breadth of possibilities for answering something.

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Who also allocates a certain number of points if the candidate has used the correct calculation path even though they have the wrong answer. 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, the messages

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that were to be disseminated in the lectures, in the exam. The students have signed to confirm that they agree to this type of examination,

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and I've appealed to their scientific honesty,

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well, I studied in the USA and it was commonplace there, half the class asked the questions for the others and vice versa.

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Nobody would have dreamt of somehow passing the questions to a neighbour because that's simply not in the American system. There can, of course, be serious consequences even to the point of exclusion from the university.

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So from that point of view the conditions aren't really that significant because it's simply a test like any other.

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"What are conditions for success for students?" Well, they have to listen to the lectures, and do the exercises because the exercises are preparation in a sense for the exam as well.

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Not that the same exercise tasks are asked in the exam, but the way of thinking, the way of calculation, the way of answering a question, have all been worked though in the exercise.

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"To what extent does digital-only communication (Corona Semester) play a role in this?" Well, what surprised me is that, well, digital communication is a big name for what we have done.

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We agreed that they would email me if there were any questions concerning the content of the lecture. What we also had

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were student mentors who were, to a greater or lesser extent, friendly in the laboratory as well, but who were now a kind of beta tester for the exercise tasks as well. So they went through them themselves first and did the calculations to check that they actually understood them. And then we re-corrected them ourselves a little bit to ensure that the students would understand them as well.

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And if there were any questions, the student mentors were the first layer to answer them.

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And then my staff and I also answered questions.

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What surprised me was actually that the questions were of a better quality than the ones normally asked after a lecture because by occupying themselves with the matter, with the listening and with this looking at the individual slides, probably with a little more leisure,

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and possibly listening to the texts several times, the questions that arose

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were simply different from those of a usual lecture.

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Which is not to criticise the classic lecture in any way, that really is – but maybe in combination, when you are able to listen to it again, when you can take your time to listen to it again and establish that you actually understand the causalities, or whether it's just a kind of pseudo-understanding if you can follow the flow of words.

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"How did the exam results compare to "conventional" exams?" It really is amazing. Whenever I finish correcting an exam, I distribute the marks, as it were. And it's almost identical to what we had last year in the exam results. Well, there was a wide scatter,

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there were some that were very good, and there were a few that were not so good. So they weren't all at the bottom or at the top end of the scale.

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So really, the distribution curve was a distorted Gaussian curve, basically just like last year's or the ones from the years before. But I actually still had last year's figures, and the two sets of results compared in almost exactly the same way.

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"Did you expect this result?" Hard to say. I had hoped for it but, well, I simply thought because the questions were very similar to those of the years before, so it wasn't really a new kind of questioning. And there are always some who work their way into the material, who understand it, ask questions,

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and then there are others. And I was a student myself once; sometimes there simply are (CPs? #00:14:25-1#) that you just have to take. So in that respect it's a good distribution of interests, of commitment and – but what I found interesting was

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that all the questions were answered correctly,

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ut not all the questions were answered correctly by one and the same person, which shows that the scatter of questions was sufficiently difficult, but could also be solved.

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I think that is a good measure of saying that an exam is too difficult or an exam is too easy. Of course, it could also be that is simply is too easy and that without in any way addressing the matter,

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that everything can be answered with simple answers. "Do 'Open Book Exams' Require Special Exam Performance Requirements?"

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When it comes to formal matters, I am someone who is often off target. Nor do I think anything of doing an exam like this, because I thought it was fair, everyone has the opportunity to answer questions,

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everyone has heard the same lecture. But what very much supported me was an enquiry. I am also a Dean, and at a meeting with our President, Mrs Brühl, I spoke about this, and also about corona and how to set up the teaching. So I said that I was planning to write a kind of open-book exam,

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although 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. And Mrs Brühl's response was, "We are teaching adults here,

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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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So with that in mind, I haven't done any kind of legal safeguarding, it's a gut feeling that it's OK as it is because I don't think any kind of exam is absolutely watertight and that can now be ... and ultimately I have now learnt that these open-book exams really are permitted, it just mustn't be a multiple-choice exam.

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So it can't just be a closed-book exam, but must consist above all of transfer questions, then everything is all right legally.

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"What are their lessons learned?" The lesson learnt is is that it often helps to decide and act under time pressure because when you realise how much talking there is about possible forms and how to do everything better

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and do everything right and everything, then it's often a little like pouring water into wine. I think when you simply 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 and make decisions. Whether or not this is all backed up by paragraphs

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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, including in digital teaching.

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"Is there anything you'd like to say in closing?" I hear lots of comments in conversations to the effect that the kind of digital teaching that we are doing now is the future. And I just want to warn against that. I still want to be able to see the students' face, to see

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whether they understand what I am saying, because then, when you've been doing that for a number of years, you develop an eye and can tell whether you're actually talking over their heads. So it's good that we have learnt something for the future, but to pretend now

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hat this is the cyber future is something that I am very, very sceptical about.