The other side of teaching

The “Demo Night”. During this final event the students presented their ideas. Picture by ENI.

This semester I experienced teaching from a perspective different from what I was used to. For the first time I was in charge of coordinating, teaching and organizing a course for students at our university (Stuttgart University).

Though I already had some experience assisting, it became apparent that there is more to consider than I anticipated. Ironically, the greatest challenge was to adapt to the possibility of finally meeting in person again. Over the last years, we struggled to adjust to the new circumstances of online teaching and limited physical meetings. It turns out that going back can be equally challenging: Zoom calls are much easier to organize than to book and prepare rooms, as well as making sure enough physical whiteboards, post-its and markers are available. Admittedly, the course “AWAKE” which I taught is a highly interactive course since its main goal is to motivate students to engage in entrepreneurial activities. Hence it requires more interactive elements than a normal lecture. Nevertheless, I learned that in addition to giving input, organizing a lecture requires serious administrative efforts to ensure a flawless course.

Furthermore, I can conclude that maybe communicating with students isn’t as easy as I thought it was. Many mails I received from the students reminded me of mails I wrote to my professors. Turns out you can try to do better and yet make the same small mistakes. Let’s see whether we can learn from those mistakes and reduce the questions in the next semester.