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My name is Ulrike Homann.

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I'm the study coordinator for the Department of Biology at the TU Darmstadt, and the Office for Student Affairs is the central point of contact for students.

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I'm in charge of the Office for Student Affairs, where we spend a lot of time giving advice and organise the entire study program.

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Well, in non-corona times – actually, we need to go back a step. Before we set up this Moodle course,

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the Office for Student Affairs was the central point of contact for students.

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And for it to work, we had fixed consultation times when the students could come in for advice,

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to collect something, to hand something in, to hand in their final papers.

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At the beginning of the last winter semester, we started a Moodle course in order to give the students this opportunity.

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So one idea was not to have fixed office hours any more,

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but to issue appointments outside office hours in Moodle to give students the opportunity

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to contact us. And simply to decouple a lot of this presence that is necessary in the Office for Student Affairs.

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Because Moodle is actually meant for teaching rather than for organisation,

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we had to be a little creative and use the opportunities that Moodle offers a little differently than is actually intended.

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And we did a lot of brainstorming at that time,

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developed a lot out of a situation that wasn't really very serious, and then we became more specific and

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and then we became more specific and

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we said, let's just try it, let's go for it and see how Moodle can help us. Whether there are any activities that offer a similar function or than can be used as they are.

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And the concept of the course is that students receive as much information as possible about their study course and up-to-date information on our Moodle course.

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And throughout that time we have tried to integrate more and more service offers that we normally offer in presence

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on site in this Office of Student Affairs course. And what is probably also important:

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suddenly we now all have access. Of course, we may have emails that need to be sent to everyone.

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But it's much easier for us as a team in the Office for Student Affairs to see what has been received where,

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what has already been processed, and where there might still be things that we need to discuss.

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And we've now combined all this on a platform.

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Well, this has also changed our work somewhat, and made it clearer and more structured.

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We've tried to make the course as clear and well structured as possible.

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We decided on a tab display, as it comes very close to a homepage, or our homepage.

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And on the other hand, we tried to integrate services that we normally offer in the Office for Student Affairs.

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These include handing in certificates or registrations, whether for exams or thesis applications.

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Well, what has now also really proved its worth as well is that all the submissions could indeed be made online

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in the Moodle course, and for instance that we could use the appointments feature that we have in Moodle to better coordinate the collection of certificates.

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Of course, there are students who really need their certificate now. And we don't want to have lots of people coming and going in the Office for Student Affairs all the time.

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And we can manage this really well with this appointment feature,

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and ensure that we only have individual students coming in at specific times for their certificates.

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The students are very grateful and satisfied with this course. There aren't often

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problems with using it because the students are used to Moodle. They use Moodle in other courses, lectures,

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and of course it's an advantage for the students to use Moodle and not just some entirely new platform.

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Plus the students have far fewer queries, which really is a phenomenon, it's totally brilliant. Well, there's been a drop in enquiries as to how does it work?

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B1: How do I do this? Where can I find that? That really has decreased significantly. And I don't think you can design a homepage so that you can offer it like that, so clearly laid-out.

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It just can't be done. Exactly. Well, it really was quite fascinating that despite corona, we had hardly any queries at the start of the semester,

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which we normally always do have, but now they're somehow not happening, for whatever reason.