Teaching beyond words

Even in digital courses, it's not just the spoken word that counts. Aspects such as tone of voice, eye contact and the appreciation experienced are also important, as a study by the University of Würzburg shows. With the corona pandemic came its big boom: digital teaching events. Depending on the incidence and the respective regulations, lecturers and students met purely digitally in specially set up Zoom meetings. Alternatively, some of the students sat at a safe distance in the lecture hall, while the rest followed the proceedings on their PCs in their home study. A team from the Institute of Education at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) used the example of two seminars in the summer semester of 2023 to investigate how these different settings affect teaching and learning. Regina Egetenmeyer, Professor for Adult and Continuing Education at JMU, and Ramon Flecha, sociologist, Professor Emeritus at the University of Barcelona and at that time Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education, were responsible for the study.