ONLINE LEARNING

Hello little Lieblings. I haven't written any posts since coming home because I didn't think what I was doing was very interesting and it's not particularly, but I realised it might be useful for some students going abroad next year. (Or not going) (sorry x). 

Obviously I can only write from my experience and institutions will most likely have totally different approaches to remote learning. I know friends who were at Spanish unis have had almost nothing. Equally, someone doing Russian casually mentioned getting FOUR HOURS of LIVE LESSONS a DAY! A pipe dream :')

How the learning from Leipzig works seems to depend totally on your teacher. I have different formats for pretty much all my modules. These include:

  •  Textproduktion & Konversation - 40 min Zoom calls (with about 8 international students on them)
  • Grammatik – Word documents which are emailed to us
  • Translation – ST (Source Text) posted on Moodle, you upload your translation to a website named Speicherwolke 
  • PPT presentations – sometimes with audio files for each slide
  • Videos of lecturers speaking – sometimes accompanied by a PPT
  • PDFs of academic articles / scans of texts– uploaded to Moodle
I have two Zoom call appointments a week, and otherwise everything is totally asynchronous. Everyone is saying it, but I definitely back the Rule of Routine. I stick as far as possible to how my schedule would have worked and although I don't have any lessons on Monday or Friday, I definitely get enough work to fill up five days, so I'm loosely sticking to a 9-5 Mon-Fri.

As well as doing Leipzig stuff I've also been trundling along with my Year Abroad Essay for Bristol. I got down a (fortunate) YouTube rabbit hole and discovered a rapper/linguist named Dr. Bitch Ray, who prompted me to change my essay subject feminism and intersectionality in contemporary German hip hop. So on my daily walks I mainly listen to German ladies rapping about their clitorises, and can count that as an hour of work. Hard life.

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