Digital teaching is a vital part of our education concept.
Johannes Kretzschmar offering a digital photonics workshop.
Image: Anne Günther (University of Jena)
Digital Teaching at the Abbe School of Photonics
User Interface of the XRTL Adaptive Optics experiment.
Screenshot: Fabian Lukas
Digitalization has finally become essential for excellence in future academic education, research and collaboration! Physical mobility can already be replaced by intelligent mobility – a mixture of physical and digital presence. At our school, a digital teaching team works at the frontier of this vision. Strong support and synergies are created by our collaboration with the excellent equipment and the experts of the Digital Teaching Lab of the Max Planck School of PhotonicsExternal link.
All our digital teaching activities fulfill a twofold purpose. On one hand, we provide support for our faculty in their basic teaching activities, including didactic and technical aspects of digital education, such as course design, technical realization and broadcasting. On the other hand, we are working on solutions for pertinent challenges of digital education, such as hybrid photonics laboratories at different locations.
The Lab Buddy System is one of our approaches to a truely hybrid experimental photonics lab. The concept is fully embedded and established in the M.Sc. Photonics course.
The Digital Teaching Lab of the Max Planck School of Photonics in Jena provides hardware, software and expert know-how for the best digital teaching for supervisors, teachers and digital enthusiasts.
Abbe School of Photonics offers an opportunity for remote students and lecturers in a digital twin environment of our real-world Abbe School of Photonics in Jena: Gather.town!
The digiPHOTON project was funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) from 2020 until 2022 and was a milestone for enabling studying remotely through digitalization of the M.Sc. Photonics program.
In order to facilitate remote students’ active participation in the laboratory experiments, a remotely controlled system was developed in close collaboration with the Lichtwerkstatt Jena. This development is ongoing and open for new ideas and extensions.
Image: Steffen Walther.
AR and VR methods
Essential parts of the research-oriented training and central laboratory internships are transferred to virtual rooms. Technologies and interaction schemes from virtual and augmented reality are used. It is possible to enter laboratories virtually and complete the training modules without the need for a real presence.
Image: Jens Meyer (University of Jena)
Hybrid Learning Solutions
In addition to the streaming-ready lecture halls at our University, our digital team has installed additional conference systems in all seminar rooms of the ACP building to enable both students as well as lecturers to attend events remotely and interact with one another.
Image: Falko Sojka
Mobile Streaming Setup
This Setup was made possible by the Max Planck School and allows to create an environment for studio quality records including Green Screen Technology in nearly every location.
Image: Falko Sojka
Studio for Educational Videos
To prepare for unexpected terms of absence from daily studies, some core elements of the initial study phase like the Prep Course Math were recorded and edited to serve as backup learning material in case of lecture outages.
One of our prime collaborators is Prof. Rick Trebino (Georgia Tech University, Atlanta, USA), an international expert in ultrafast optics and spectroscopy. For quite some years, Prof. Trebino has been developing high-quality courses of PowerPoint lectures for four college-level optics and physics courses, complete with pictures, movies, animations, and derivations. This material is provided on his website and fully open to every student, teacher, and lecturer for use and distribution.
