“Can you hear me?” Asks lecturer Christian Walter into his microphone, and of course he doesn’t mean the students who are sitting directly in front of him. Can you hear me? An interesting sentence in the new era, semester four after Corona. The answer comes promptly and pops up on the wall above the blackboard in the lecture hall: “Only very bad”.
Walter’s assistants click on the laptop, pull cables, press buttons on the projector, computer and microphone. Then the post comes in the lecture chat: “Significantly better”. Two minutes before the beginning of the lecture “International Business Law” in the so-called learning tower of the LMU on Geschwister-Scholl-Platz. Relief in the professor’s eyes. That is studying in autumn 2021: many possibilities, many imponderables, many question marks.
The first weeks of this semester are shaped more by the trappings of the lectures, seminars and exercises of the approximately 100,000 students in Munich than by the midst of everyday learning and understanding. There is a lot of ignorance, not only among freshmen about their new studies, but also with long semesters. And there is resentment, which tends to increase in the first few days. A tour.
Those who find the right space are happy
Twenty minutes before Walter gets his online gear up and running, he’s at the door. The lecture hall is still occupied, but Walter wanted the large room because many had registered online.
This is an advantage: Register in the portal and the lecturer knows whether he needs a larger room. Of course, everyone has to find it first. And judging by the length of the queue that can be seen in front of the information desks of the LMU and TU in the first few days, it doesn’t seem to be easy.
Orientation is particularly important in the first few days at the university – many students look for it at the information desk.
(Photo: Robert Haas)
While the first are looking for Walter’s lecture in the learning tower, Florian Meidinger is standing in front of a room plan in the main building. The 19-year-old starts in “Protestant Religious Education for High School Teaching” and is looking for the space for the “Introduction to the Old Testament” seminar.
“It’s going very well,” says Meidinger, “when you’ve found the rooms.” So far, so normal for any freshman. Brochures and introductory events help. However, only to a limited extent with the many new options for putting together the timetable.
4K and 3G on the 1st floor
“Switching between online and presence is not easy,” says Meidinger. On the first day the servers also collapsed because about 100,000 people wanted to access the remaining space for seminar places. Studying in 2021 does not only mean combining seminars and lectures, but also free spaces in seminars, canteens and libraries, expected cycling distances and available WiFi.
Meidinger queues at the information desk while the door opens on the other side of the street and lecturer Christian Walter and his students can start the lecture on international business law. Walter says: “It is great that we can offer face-to-face events again, but it has advantages and disadvantages in times of pandemics. And I am curious to see how the range of courses will balance between face-to-face and online in the long term.”
If there are two weeks in the long run, one cannot speak of importing yet. Walter observes that the proportion of online listeners in the higher semesters is significantly higher than among the first-year students. “One possible explanation is that the students who have been at the university for a long time have already found their social circle. Therefore, the presence is perhaps no longer so important to them.”
Then everything is finally there, everyone has found the hall, the masks are on and the picture is sharp. In short: 4K and 3G on the 1st floor.
One advantage is that in addition to the 41 in the hall, 13 more can take part online, some of which may not want to cycle to the university. The disadvantage is that Walter has to repeat every question from the room so that the onliners understand it. Although it is very quiet in the room, very different from lunchtime in the cafeteria on Arcisstrasse.
The desire to be together is enormous
The noise is so loud that every clink of cutlery is drowned out. You can measure the relief in decibels about the finally possible live lunch again.
Two Erasmus students are on their way out. She got hit socially in particular, came to Munich a year and a half ago to gain experience abroad, and then sat in her rooms. Arantxa Gonzales from Spain says: “How nice to sit here between the others instead of just picking up a box of food.” And celebrate? “Maybe I’ll do that now, too, but one thing at a time.”
Just sit outside with others and talk about God, the university and the world: Even that wasn’t possible for a long time. The better it feels now.
(Photo: Robert Haas)
Architecture student David Fink, 25, stands in line with a tray and says: “You can tell the euphoria that people want each other, just as many now approach and treat each other.” He himself is an old hand in the third master’s semester in architecture, i.e. an old hand in the study time calculation, but he also missed working together on models very much – the exchange about how someone else builds or approaches a task.
“You didn’t really get to know anyone through Zoom,” he says. Sometimes he has to look a long time at fellow students who he has only seen on the screen for a year and a half before he recognizes him.
“One and a half years of tiles are enough”
The number of those who cannot find their seminar room has not decreased a week later. Four people are waiting in the autumn sun in front of the TU main building, and the employee hands over copied site plans. “Your destination is there,” he says and relieved young people storm off.
Next door at the electrical engineering faculty, an employee checks vaccination records and student ID. And then you can feel a real study atmosphere again: the smell of old wood and stale air, two highly committed people already talking to the lecturer, a few tired ones who still lay their heads on the table.
Gunther Friedl, who heads the Controlling Chair and is about to talk about corporate accounting, is very euphoric. “It is a pleasure to be in the lecture hall, one and a half years of tiles are enough.” Tiles, the small video boxes in digital teaching. “There is a completely different energy here in the room, a completely different presence.”
Of course you are distracted here, too, but not like at home. “The longer the lectures were digital, the more people turned off their cameras.” To do other things on the side.
More ballpoint pens than e-pens
Friedl uses the best of both worlds. He throws chats on the board, and always does a live quiz, which previously worked well digitally. “Or a survey, which the students then answer on their smartphones and which can be seen on the projector.”
His lecture is also recorded. For the online listeners, but also for those present. “Many don’t even notice during the lecture if they haven’t understood something.” Then you look at the passage again. Whereby recording is not the same as recording, as you can experience outside the lecture hall.
Take a quick breath, chat with others, follow a lecture online: there is a lot going on in the corridors of the TU.
(Photo: Robert Haas)
There are three young men in their seventh semester civil engineering sitting at a bench in the hallway, chatting while a lecture is running on their computers. “I just had a live event and should have been home 15 minutes later for a digital lecture,” says Paul Fichtner, 21, visibly annoyed. However, the online lecture will no longer be available because the lecturer wants the audience to be there live, whether digital or analog.
At the end there is a knock, that is still the case
Then it’s wonderful to sit at a table like this at university, isn’t it? “Sure, but there are very few of these places,” says Stefan Dieing next to Fichtner. “And only very few are allowed into the study rooms.” That doesn’t work yet, the three of them agree. “The problem is known, but apparently not that important,” says Fichtner. Of course, they also see the advantages of online learning, but there is still a lot of trouble.
And while at another table a young woman, looking at her pad, says: “I have no idea what to look at where today”, the lecture at Professor Friedl’s upstairs is over and the students knock on the wooden tables. It is the age-old thank you to the lecturers, but currently somehow seems as if many are reassuring themselves that they are really sitting in a lecture hall made of stone and wood again.