We visited the digital teaching day of the University of Augsburg. Especially recently, qualitative digital teaching has become even more important. On the one hand, because digitization offers us many new opportunities, and it could be called foolish not to take advantage of them. On the other hand, because we seem to need digital methods more and more to function as a society.

Today, was a good opportunity to find out what has been done recently at our university in the direction of digitized teaching.

After the welcome, an interesting lecture by guest lecturer Dr. Bram De Wever from Ghent University in Belgium awaited us. He has been active in the field of digital teaching for quite some time, and gave the audience a rough overview of technical terms such as blended and online learning, flipped classroom, and synchronous vs. asynchronous teaching concepts. Afterwards, attendees could participate in one of a total of five workshops. There, it was possible to try out such exciting things as didactic AR with Medienrealität and eye tracking glasses, among other thins, while brainstorming how these technologies could be used in teaching. After some tasty snacks, it was time for the Idea Camp. Here, groups of students and teachers were asked to develop ideas together, on how digital teaching could be implemented even further at Augsburg University. These were submitted in digital form, checked for usefulness as well as feasibility. After the evaluation, a prize will be awarded for the best project. Next, at the Market of Possibilities, various institutions of the university presented their perspective on digital teaching, and what they had to offer.

It was possible to learn about projects as diverse as online guitar lesson’s videos especially for elementary school teachers, or an app that is supposed to help students to get to know and regulate their learning behavior more. Other presenters were, among others, the library, the ASTa, or a company for online examination software.

At the end of the event, the student and teacher awards for digital teaching were presented to the music education department.

All in all, it was a very nice event, which was organized by all university institutions together and, in addition to an intensive exchange of knowledge, was also a very nice opportunity to get to know each other.

In January, two teams from different chairs at the University of Augsburg decided to participate in the COVID-19 AI challenge. The competition’s objective for each team is to train a machine learning model that accurately predicts the severity of the disease, on the basis of lung CT-scans.

Generally, the Challenge is structured in two parts:

First, the qualification round of approximately 4 months was concluded on April 13^th, and now, the final round started. Its objective is to optimize the previously trained models.

In total, about 50 teams might have participated in the qualification round.  However, only the 10 best teams are invited to the final round.

During the qualification round, the participating teams had access to a publicly available data set of about 2.000 lung CT-scans, with corresponding clinical data like patient age and sex, as well as their classification labels: healthy, normal, severe covid. The data was collected in various hospitals in France during the first covid outbreak in March and April 2020.

While training and designing their approach, each team could compare and evaluate their model’s results on a test data set, consisting of 200 previously unseen data samples. The results were published on an unofficial leaderboard.

Regarding the final round, the participating teams have until May 12^th to optimize their models on the complete data set consisting of ~10.000 samples. The 3 best finalists will be invited to publish a paper in cooperation with the challenge’s organizers  - a huge motivation for any researcher.

As you can see, it remains exciting!