“Hybrid” and “online teaching,” “blended learning” – what do these terms mean?

Hybrid teaching refers to students being present both in the lecture room, the non-virtual one, and online at the same time. That is, there is a ‘live’ session taking place that you broadcast online, with varying levels of interaction between you, the students in the classroom, and those online. All of the department’s lecture rooms have been equipped with a camera, a microphone, and a computer, to enable you to employ this model of teaching.

Blended learning refers to a ‘blend’ of in-class teaching and so-called self-directed study periods, during which students do not attend classes and study online. For example, instead of having your class read one chapter of a book per week, you can split the class in two groups, have each group attend the class the other week and have them read two chapters for each session, doing some work online between classes.

(Pure) digital/online teaching. Takes place online only.

The Centre for Teaching and Learning provides different models for various form of e-learning that we encourage you to have a look at. There is also an online forum, where you can exchange ideas with other philosophers.

Video conferencing systems

The University of Vienna offers your different video conferencing systems; of these the following are recommended for teaching:

Which of these you want to use is up to you. BigBlueButton shows more participants in parallel (up to 20), is easier to use for people with disabilities, and allows you to download a list of participants

You can also use these tools for conferences by creating a so called “guest link” that you can send to participants who are not members of the University of Vienna.

COVID-19 tracking

The Centre for Teaching and Learning has developped models for courses. The “Basic model for lectures 1” includes an example for using Moodle to track which students are present (there is also a template Moodle course that you can use). You can import that template into your Moodle courses.

If you use do so, the students are asked whether they plan to attend “vor Ort” (literally, “at the place,” meaning offline). Students also see how many of them plan to attend offline, that is, have affirmed that question.

If you rather want to divide your students into groups, we recommend the Moodle tools “Groups” (“Gruppen” in the German version) and “Self-enrolment” (“Selbsteinschreibung”).

Instructions for students

We recommend that you send your students the following instructions:

Recommendations

  • You can test drive all e-learning tools that the University of Vienna provides by creating a personal sandbox course in the Moodle-Schulung (Moodle training session).
  • If you do hybrid or online teaching, ask your students if one them is willing to volunteer to keep an eye on the chat during the session and introduce questions asked there into the class. This way you need not split your attention between the students in front of you/in the video stream and the chat.

Further information

Moodle

The audio/video equipment of our lecture rooms

E-learning

Video conferencing systems

General information