The COVID-19 crisis influenced universities worldwide in early 2020. In Austria, all universities were closed in March 2020 as a preventive measure, and meetings with over 100 people were banned and a curfew was imposed. This development also had a massive impact on teaching, which in Austria takes place largely face-to-face. In this paper we would like to describe the situation of an Austrian university regarding e-learning before and during the first three weeks of the changeover of the teaching system, using the example of Graz University of Technology (TU Graz). The authors provide insights into the internal procedures, processes and decisions of their university and present figures on the changed usage behaviour of their students and teachers. As a theoretical reference, the article uses the e-learning readiness assessment according to Alshaher (2013), which provides a framework for describing the status of the situation regarding e-learning before the crisis. The paper concludes with a description of enablers, barriers and bottlenecks from the perspective of the members of the Educational Technology department.
Digital skills are now essential, not only in information and communications technology (ICT) jobs, but for employees across all sectors. The aim of this article is to detail how employees’ digital skills can be fostered through a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), how such an offer is used and what the effects of such a measure are. Using an approach oriented at action research and design-based research activities, the authors describe the basics of their finding on existing European competence frameworks for digital skills and European projects that used MOOCs, the development and design of the MOOC, the evaluation on the basis of learning analytics insights and a questionnaire, as well as a reflection. The MOOC was offered as Open Educational Resources (OER) on the Austrian MOOC platform iMOOX.at from March to April 2021, with 2083 participants, of whom 381 fully completed the course (at end of June 2021) and 489 filled out the final questionnaire.
In this paper, an exploratory mixed-method study is presented examining the video-related behavior of participants of a massive open online course (MOOC; N=1.238). Firstly, detailed log-file analysis of six videos has been carried out to compare clickstreams of videos with and without integrated H5P quiz integration. It shows quite different seeking and watching pattern behavior in video with H5P quizzes. In a second step, learners participated in an online questionnaire (N=707): Most of them see the quizzes in videos as always or mostly helpful (67%). The survey also shows that for many, taking notes, turning on subtitles, using the transcripts or even increasing the speed are important activities when learning with the videos in the MOOC. In a third step, interviews with ten MOOC participants are a source for qualitative insights in how the learners use the learning videos.