Ideas for online lectures

There are many ways to implement teaching online. The central question is with which online methods and tools you can best achieve your teaching goals. To help you plan your online course in a good and goal-oriented way, we have compiled some tips for you here.

On this page we present tips for the implementation of your lecture in an online setting.

ATTENTION: Always keep an eye on the workload of your students and do not give too many materials and tasks to work on.

Lecturing is probably the most formative teaching activity for lectures. As a lecturer, you prepare the contents of your lecture in a comprehensible way, structure them, explain the background, derive theories and link them with examples. This is usually associated with the goal of imparting knowledge and content, stimulating understanding processes and laying a solid foundation for independent further learning. There are also various online options for achieving these goals.

Links

There are already many well-prepared and well-founded materials on the Internet on a wide range of subjects and topics. It is worthwhile to search specifically for existing material and provide the appropriate links to literature, videos etc. in Moodle (here you will find material collections for many subjects).

Material for self-study

Upload your scripts, powerpoint slides, illustrative materials, etc. that you would also use in your classroom lecture to Moodle.

Tip: Enrich your lecture slides with comments in the notes and upload a PDF of the PPT notes view. Students can download the material from Moodle and work on it in self-study.

Instructional videos

Especially if you do not have existing educational videos or other usable material on your topic, you can also provide your own lecture recordings and educational videos for students. Tips for creating such instructional videos are available here for Windows, Mac and iPad. Successful lecture recordings do not have to be 1.5 hours long. Didactically, shorter videos focusing on specific topics and aspects make more sense. If necessary, several short videos on individual aspects are also suitable. These also have the advantage that uploading the videos on your site is much faster.

An important element of typical lectures, apart from the lecture, is also to enter into an exchange with students on the topics and open questions and to stimulate thinking and learning processes for a deeper processing of the learning material by the students through questions and small tasks. In online teaching, too, you can achieve these goals through various methods.

Discussion forum in Moodle

Enable and answer your students' questions in the forum and encourage discussions - also among students.

Test

Ask questions about your content in a test in Moodle. This allows students to test their understanding and ask more specific questions.

Tasks

In order to encourage active processing and consolidation of the content, you can use the task function in MOodle to demand various learning activities from your students: for example, students can create a short summary or transfer the content to a concrete example, or they can formulate their own. By setting deadlines for these tasks, you can help students to structure their learning over time.

Wiki/Glossary

Integrate a wiki or glossary into your Moodle course, in which your students collaboratively collect and structure central knowledge contents of the lecture.

Tip

In order to create liabilities, it is advisable for students to formulate clear tasks and activities and to set concrete deadlines for all tasks and activities.

The organisation of learning and especially time and self-management is a challenge for students in online teaching. You can significantly support your students in structuring their learning time sensibly and using the materials in a goal-oriented manner by communicating the general conditions and organizational information very clearly and transparently.

In addition, when planning and implementing your online teaching concepts, you will also benefit from the formulation of your teaching goals, your requirements for self-study, the recommended, sensible sequence of individual materials and activities and your ideas about how long self-study with individual materials or the involvement with various activities should take.

Use the existing structural elements of your Moodle course to organize your content and activities, e.g:

Course structure

Structure your Moodle course according to the main topics you will cover in the seminar (topic format) or according to the time available for a content unit (time segment format).

Descriptions of contents and activities

Descriptions provide the students with instructions on how to handle the materials provided.

Text fields

Text fields help to structure the individual sections of the molecular course. Use the text fields e.g. to insert headings or additional editing hints or to communicate your teaching goals for the individual sections in a transparent way.

Announcements

Via the forum "Announcements", which is already pre-set in your Moodle course, you can reach all students in your course by email, your messages will also be logged there.

Further help and information about Moodle

Moodle demo courses

In this course we have compiled typical contents and activities for a lecture:

Demo Course Lecture

Here you will find helpful activities in Moodle to support your seminar:

Demo course Seminar

Typical situations of an internship can also be depicted well in Moodle:

Demo Course Internship

Moodle self-study courses

In this course you will learn the basic settings of Moodle and get tips for creating your Moodle course.

Moodle basics for beginners

In this course we have collected activities, content and tips for using Moodle in typical teaching formats.

Moodle as an alternative to classroom teaching

In this course you will find information about the services offered by the Competence Centre eEducation in Medicine.

Competence Centre eEducation

In this course you will find all the Moodle features listed once so that you can learn about their function before you use them.

Moodle possibilities

Links and resources

On the e-learning portal of the University of Ulm you will find many instructions on Moodle and other topics of online teaching (e.g. legal issues).

E-Learning Portal

On the official Moodle documentation you will find detailed descriptions of all the features and activities of Moodle.

Moodle Docs

Overview of Moodle activities and corresponding educational goals.

Moodle 2 - Tools for trainers

YouTube channel with English videos - German subtitles are also available.#

Learn Moodle 3.7

Help & contact

Help and support in the departments

Contact the digitisation advisors in your department

They are in regular contact with ZLE and kiz and coordinate the online teaching offers.

For technical problems and questions please contact the Help Desk.

For didactic and organisational questions please contact the team of the ZLE.