This presentation examines the question of how early-BA-teacher-education-students experience the shift to online learning during the Covid-19-related lockdowns.

Online learning creates new physical and social routines, in which the private space of the home (office) plays a greater role (Klein/Liebsch 2020). When online teaching and learning became a necessity due to the lockdown, routines of teaching and learning were suspended. With the shift to a great deal of asynchronous learning, students complained about a much higher workload, about the lack of social contact and the loneliness of online learning (Maydl 2020, Bley 2020). Those problems with online teaching are not new or unexpected, they are just very condensed, intensified, more existential. Students and academic teachers have to face a variety of insecurities. The new digital spaces create potentials but also restrictions, they create visibilities and invisibilities - along hierarchies or also against traditional hierarchies (who is allowed to speak?) (Bohnenkamp et al. 2020). Therefore, the potentials of inclusion through digital teaching and the dangers of exclusion need to be addressed and reflected upon. (cp. Ibid.).

While self-study plays a part in traditional academic learning – e.g. the regular amount of reading in a Bachelors degree program approximately is 2300 hours (cp. Obermaier 2017: 17), the share of self-study becomes much bigger in online learning. Even before the complete shift to online learning, it was clear that self-study presents learners with greater challenges in terms of self-organisation and self-motivation, and that there has been only little research on the concrete support teachers could provide (Kleß 2016). While self-directed learning enables more flexibility on the part of the learners and thus e.g. simplifies part-time study, what is lacking is the technical infrastructure for it and the adequate training of university teachers. Universities usually have too few resources for creating corresponding didactic and organisational framework conditions (Petko/Uhlemann/Büeler 2009). The competences for learning in the virtual space are often still lacking for both students and teachers, but are now unquestioningly taken for granted and thus lead to great overstrain. For the training of media competence, time and space are needed, so that didactic considerations are not subordinated to the practical selection of tools. (Schiefner-Rohs/Hofhues 2018). After all, online learning is a trend and the technical upgrading of universities is happening above all under the pressure of international competition for excellence and efficiency (Miller 2009). Even though new technologies are always associated with hopes for improvements and further developments, those hopes are not always fulfilled (Schiefner-Rohs/Hofhues 2018).

Against this background of critical examination of online learning, the question this presentation will explore is what obstacles students face and what strategies they show in dealing with the suddenly greater need for self-organisation. What should be unlearned in order to enable fruitful online learning?

The goal is to develop a clearer idea of what students need in order to successfully engage in online learning and accordingly, to find the means of helping students to develop more adequate strategies of dealing with online teaching than they previously had.

The presentation draws on the research with 25 students in a online seminar in summer semester 2021 in which their experiences with online learning were the central theme. Students were asked to come up with questions around the topic of online learning during the lockdown, and agreed on two questions: who benefits from online learning and who is potentially excluded? Collective memory work was chosen as the method of participatory research and was carried out by the students. Collective memory work is a method that allows students to research, reflect, and develop a collective understanding of structural problems. The roots of the method lie in the women's movement, it was used to contrast the experiences of women with social theory (cp. Haug 1991), and it takes a poststructuralist and deconstructive stance on language, by looking for the ideology in our everyday understandings of social processes. A great part of the method is analysis of language, the material being the (anonymized) memories of the students. Collective memory work does not divide the researchers from the researched, so working with the method always means self-reflection and the development of a collective understanding of the problem. For the seminar, an analysis guideline was developed based on Haug's work (1999) and the recent version of Ortner/Thuswald (2012), who addressed institutional constraints in daycare centers with the help of collective memory work. All steps of the research process – from formulating the research interest to finding an impulse for the memories to the analysis and interpretation were done in cooperation with the students – a challenge in a distance learning semester. For this purpose, the formats synchronous videoconferencing, asynchronous forum discussions and polling, as well as self-organized small group work were used.

This presentation focuses on the findings from working with the students’ memories and discussions and relate them to an overall critical discussion of online learning in academia. The results of the analysis show that there is a much higher need of self-organisation, and that this generates pressure, leading to passivity and anxiety in students. The impulse for writing down memories was chosen by the students to be “when I didn’t know what to do first”. Not surprisingly, the analysis of the memories showed that students tend to overburden themselves with workloads, which might result in self-doubt, lack of motivation and time, topped by the feeling of fending for themselves alone. What seems to be specific to the online environment is that the space in these memories is limited (a room, a desk, thoughts and eventualities) and that hardly any other persons appear to play a role. The perceived scope for action is correspondingly very limited. Collectively analyzing their memories helped students to come to a clearer understanding of how they could have become more active, e.g. by communicating more with other students and also with their professors. The collective memory work led to a clearer view on what is important in online learning and teaching and enabled the students to formulate these requirements. Online teaching clearly can’t just focus on delivering the information and materials, academic teachers have to provide students with a much clearer structure, encourage student interaction, give even more feedback and try to foster an atmosphere of understanding in online learning environments.

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