21.04.2020 Information on the summer term at the School of Business and Economics #4

Foto: Colourbox.de

Dear Students,

yesterday we started our courses in this truly special summer semester. We take this as an occasion for our fourth email, with which we would like to inform you about the further course of the summer term 2020.

Based on your course registrations in MARVIN, our lecturers started to send you the access data (e.g. passwords) for ILIAS courses and/or any planned online meetings via Zoom. Please use these credentials to register in ILIAS courses of your chosen modules, where you then will get access to the learning materials. In addition, we will now use ILIAS as the primary communication channel, i.e.: from now on you will receive emails about modules especially from within ILIAS. If you discover in the coming weeks, that you do not want to take part in a certain module, we ask you to unsubscribe/deregister in both ILIAS and MARVIN, in order to reduce your flood of e-mails and the system load.

To provide technical support for the switch to online teaching, we have hired five student assistants as a help desk team, to support teachers and students in (technical) problems. If you have any questions or require technical support in connection with digital teaching, please contact: .

Since yesterday, April 20, the departmental library is reopened between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., for book lending but not as a workspace. Please see here (unfortunately, only in German) for further information: https://www.uni-marburg.de/de/ub/ueber-uns/standorte/bibliothek-wirtschaftswissenschaften/bw

The switch to online teaching this semester requires all of us - teachers and students - to make several adjustments. It is often not possible to simply transfer lectures and exercises from an auditorium into a virtual room and replace them with webinars. Rather, the individual research groups at our school made different teaching materials available in ILIAS with a great deal of effort. This ranges from lecture slides, online assignments, textbook extracts, and papers to videos. In addition, many research groups offer online meetings that partly replace lectures, but partly also serve to discuss, deepen, or apply previously provided materials. We deliberately want to try out different formats and evaluate them afterwards.

This requires you to engage in different teaching formats and different approaches in your individual modules. It is important that you keep an eye on your email account and read emails carefully, because emails from ILIAS will become the primary means of communication. It is also important that you carefully prepare for each module using the teaching materials provided. Structured self-studying will become an important success factor in this semester.

And of course, not everything that we have thought up will work out this semester – at least not 100% from the start. However, we can work together to make teaching better even in these times, and asking for your trust and support in this venture.

So far, we unfortunately have no news regarding new dates for the exams that were cancelled in March. As soon as there is something to report, we will contact you. Please continue to inform yourself about all current developments on the website of the university: https://uni-marburg.de/corona

Of course, we are still here for you and will be happy to answer any questions - and listen to your suggestions.

Best regards,
Prof. Dr. Torsten Wulf, Dr. Regine Reck, Kai Brenneke