While thousands of students and employees are denied access to the university, an interdisciplinary task force is busy working with the teaching staff to find out which courses can be reorganised and held remotely, and which must be postponed. Here you can get an update on their work and find the current recommendations for teaching staff.

2020.03.19 | Simon Byrial Fischel

At the moment, a lot of work is being put in to reorganising as much of the teaching activity as possible to work remotely. Photo: Lars Kruse/AU

Shortly after the university campus was closed down, the faculty management team appointed an interdisciplinary task force and entrusted it with the task of reorganising the faculty's teaching activities and exams so that as much as possible can be carried out remotely. The group consists of:

• Vice-dean for Education Lise Wogensen Bach
• Deputy Head of Department Niels Uldbjerg, Department of Clinical Medicine
• Deputy Head of Department Birgitte Mønster Christensen, Department of Biomedicine
• Deputy Head of Department Caroline Bindslev Hørsted, Department of Dentistry and Oral Health
• Deputy Head of Department Kirsten Frederiksen, Department of Public Health
• Head of Studies Administration Anna Bak Maigaard
• Head of IT Support Mads Rasmussen, Health IT Support 
• Head of the pre-graduate area Liza Strandgaard, Center for Health Sciences Education
• Administrative Officer Christian Stampe Olesen, Department of Clinical Medicine

The interdisciplinary task force is working closely with Health’s teaching staff and the local boards of studies to review all courses on the degree programmes and assess how – and whether – each course can be reorganised. Similar local task forces have been appointed at all departments and schools.

Recommendations for teaching staff

The group's current recommendations to you as a member of teaching staff are that you should as far as possible reorganise your teaching such that the students: 

1. Perform take-home assignments, receive questions about relevant literature, perform calculations, statistical exercises or similar, that are relatively easy to establish and communicate via Blackboard.

2. Participate in lectures and classroom instruction via video conferencing or by using short video recordings with the help of the Zoom video conferencing tool.

Stay in contact

Once you have reorganised a course, it is important that you remember to notify the students via Blackboard. It is a good idea to do this via the ‘Announcements’ and ‘Send Mail’ functions.

Try to maintain a high level of information about assignments, deadlines, opportunities for feedback, etc. It may also be a good idea to create a Q&A forum on Blackboard, so that your students can ask you and each other questions in an open forum.

Find help and sparring

CESU is ready to help if you need academic feedback on how to reorganise your teaching, and you are welcome to visit the centre's website, where you can register for the workshop on lectures as remote teaching and find inspiration for alternative digital teaching activities
(This website is currently in Danish only, but the workshops are available for English speakers as well. If you have any questions on how to sign up, please contact Lone Folmer Nielsen on (+45) 9350 9044).

You can find more information and inspiration on how to reorganise your teaching and transition to remote teaching as well as guidelines for the various platforms that are available, on AU’s Corona site on Transition to remote teaching and learning. From here, you can easily carry on to the faculty's website with the necessary information and contact information.

If you have any questions about applicable copyright rules when you share materials with your students on BlackBoard, please read more on the Royal Danish Library’s dedicated copyright website. All students have been made aware that stricter rules apply to downloading material, sharing streaming links and similar.

This situation is also changing hourly, and for this reason Health's task force holds daily video conferences to stay abreast of the situation – so please remember to keep up-to-date on AU's corona website.

Vice-dean: Thank you for your great efforts!

Lise Wogensen Bach, vice-dean for education, has a lot of respect for the great efforts being made right now by the studies administration, teaching staff and managers in the educational area in terms of finding solutions in such an extraordinary situation.

"We’re in a very, very extraordinary situation that is changing all the time. We’re facing a massive task, but it's not insurmountable," says Lise Wogensen Bach and continues. "Everyone is working flat out right now, but we’re optimistic and naturally hope that both teaching staff and students will have patience. As long as we’re all working in the same direction, we’ll find solutions for everything.”