This semester, every lecture of Inf-Einf-B, the introduction to computer science at the University of Bamberg, gets a film poster. It is drawn by a pen plotter, a machine that moves felt-tip pens across the paper.
David J. Malan teaches CS50 at Harvard, an introduction to computer science whose lectures are freely available online. In them he tears a phone book in half to show how to search a sorted list, and he brings volunteers on stage to act out an algorithm with their own bodies. This is called theatrical teaching.
Inf-Einf-B builds on CS50, and I think Malan’s theatrical teaching is a …
Read More →Security courses assume a lot: computer architecture, some maths, the terminal, Linux, networks, the web. In my course “Introduction to Security and Privacy”, students who have never opened a terminal sit next to students who run Linux at home. In the first tutorial, one half is lost and the other half is bored.
This semester our chair made 19 short companion videos in three series, which anyone may use under CC BY-SA 4.0. The teaser explains the idea in under two minutes.
Teaser for the companion videos (English, with burned-in captions) The videos Website for the companion videos – all 19 …
Read More →How do you test programming when the code no longer has to be written by the student?
This question has been on my mind since November 2022, when ChatGPT started producing passable Python code. The standard answer is often: closed-book exam. Programming on paper. That answer feels outdated.
We’re training people who will probably work with AI tools later. Why should they pretend these tools don’t exist during exams?
One approach I find interesting: Stop asking “Did you write all of this yourself?” and ask instead “Can you explain it?” Authorship of the code …
Read More →Editor’s note: This is a guest contribution.
This article is based on the introductory talk “What happens after a project ends in (digitally supported) higher education development, and how do we keep the door to the digital space open?” at the TURN Conference 2025.
We all know the story: projects come – and projects go. And all too often, they take their ideas, visions, and tools with them. What remains is the question: How do we preserve what has been built? And what stays when the project period ends and the funding runs out?
Projects in Digital Higher Education …
Read More →Article Series: Exams and AI In this Part 2 we examine the AI temptation for instructors: automatic grading, AI-generated tasks, and policy chaos.
→ Keynote announcement
Previously published:
The Illusion of Control – Fighting symptoms instead of systemic solutions Upcoming parts:
Performance instead of Fiction – Three ways out of the trust crisis (available Nov 27) The Uncomfortable Truth – From symptom treatment to systemic questions (available Dec 4) → All slides from the talk (PDF, German)
Part 2: The AI Temptation In Part 1 of this series, we saw how students are becoming passengers of …
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