Experiences in Online Teaching and Learning

To support schools in teaching computer science, we have started the Informatik@School project. In this project, which is meanwhile funded by "Oberfrankenstiftung", we communicate computer science content to beginners and matured students. As the number of participating students is very large in comparison to the number of advisors and big distances have to be bridged, we separated students into two groups. Students from schools located not far from our university are taught in common face-to-face lessons, while far-off students get taught the same content in online lessons. In this paper we want to present the project, its preconditions and the didactical and content based concepts. We will introduce a web based technical environment which fulfills these issues and facilitates realization of afore mentioned online courses. Finally, we present lessons learned from this project and draw conclusions especially concerning the technical platform which consists of hardware and software used.