My position as research associate came with “special teaching” tasks, which consisted of several projects in the digital transformation of higher mathematical education in cooperation with Christian Serpé.
Video solutions
The core project was to establish video solutions to the weekly exercises, which frees the tutors of having to present the solutions during the exercise sessions. instead the valuable time can then be used for more interactive tutoring.
We evaluated various methods of producing such videos, but in the end settled on a simple setup using iPads and external mics. The videos are incorporated into the LMS (Moodle) as interactive videos using H5P. When the corona pandemic hit, this method was used in all beginner courses and managing the video production became one of my main tasks. I forced all producers to use GitLab for this, and it turned out that even without any source code the issue board of GitLab can be an extremely useful tool.
Another learning from this project is that in order to explain something well a deep understanding of the material is crucial. Much of my supervision of the video producers (mostly student assistants) consisted of mathematical discussion prior the actual video production.
Catalogue
The videos are meant to be recycled in future courses. To facilitate this I created a catalogue of all the videos. The python code behind this expects metadata in the form of JSON files for each video and assembles all the data including PDF solutions into the catalogue (this can be done locally, but is usually done in the GitLab CI). Currently, the catalogue is a PDF file, but the code first assembles all the data in an output agnostic way, so writing an additional web output should not be too complicated.