Excellent teaching under Covid-19 conditions

Courses are a challenge due to the pandemic. This is recognized at the university with the Berninghausen Prize. So there is not only the student price. Two teachers also received an award in the category “Outstanding teaching under Covid-19 conditions”.
The two winners and the winners are long-standing university music director Dr . Susanne Gläß and the political scientist Sebastian Möller (category “Excellent teaching under Covid-19 conditions”) as well as the mathematics didactics professor Maike Vollstedt (student award). The three awards are endowed with 2,000 euros each. On Wednesday, December 2, 2020, the traditional award ceremony will take place as a public online event at 6 p.m. Interested parties are cordially invited to take part. A total of 135 proposals were submitted. A selection committee, consisting of lecturers, university staff and students, viewed the proposals and nominated the winners who dealt with the following projects and topics:

“Ravel Boléro”: An orchestra goes online
How do you deal with the already planned orchestra project in Corona times? That was the challenge that Susanne Gläß had to face in her teaching project in the summer semester. Ultimately, she managed to create a replacement for real orchestral playing as part of her “Ravel Boléro” project. “It is possible to give a lecture digitally,” she says. “But playing orchestras in real time is digitally technically impossible up to now.” However, the long-time university music director had an idea of how digitally, at least approximately, a replacement for the listening to each other that is possible with live orchestra play could be created: She developed an additive process, in which the orchestral voices were played one after the other in different sections and then put together on the computer immediately after each individual recording. The recordings were made by the orchestra members individually at home. In addition, there were weekly video conferences on musical design and recording problems. Gläß received technical support from a professional team: Alumnus Gerd Anders, horn player in the orchestra and professional sound engineer, Simon Knobbe, trumpeter in the orchestra and recently graduated master’s degree in electrical engineering, as well as for video editing Jan-Hendrik von Stemm, administrative employee of the university music. In the cultural church In addition, there were weekly video conferences on musical design and recording problems. Gläß received technical support from a professional team: Alumnus Gerd Anders, horn player in the orchestra and professional sound engineer, Simon Knobbe, trumpeter in the orchestra and recently graduated master’s degree in electrical engineering, as well as for video editing Jan-Hendrik von Stemm, administrative employee of the university music. In the cultural church In addition, there were weekly video conferences on musical design and recording problems. Gläß received technical support from a professional team: Alumnus Gerd Anders, horn player in the orchestra and professional sound engineer, Simon Knobbe, trumpeter in the orchestra and recently completed master’s degree in electrical engineering, as well as for video editing Jan-Hendrik von Stemm, administrative employee of the university music. In the cultural churchSt . Stephani was then presented the musical result from June 27th to July 18th, 2020 on a total of 21 dates. The individually recorded audio tracks were played from 34 speakers. The audience was able to walk between these loudspeakers in compliance with the hygienic conditions and perceive individual voices that the human ear is unable to filter out in normal orchestral performances. The 50 orchestra members benefited from the project in many ways: Among other things, they got to know new forms of musical production, improved their own playing through up to ten repeated recordings, maintained close contact with the group and experienced creativity. In addition, a video-sound collage was created and posted on Youtubeuploaded. The jury was consistently impressed by this project, which would not have taken place without Covid-19.