︎︎︎Ideas for (self-) care while teaching and learning design online


In March 2020 – at the start of the first lockdown (in Berlin) due to the Covid-19 pandemic – we started a collaborative google doc to gather ideas, strategies, tools and briefs for the ad-hoc transition to online teaching.

We have observed that there has been a lot of discussion about how to maintain teaching, tackling technical accessibility and so on –  but seen little concrete suggestions on how to deal with the “side-effects” of this new university-/student-/teacher-life online. For us – it is part of our job as (design) educator/ teacher to care for my students – so how can we implement the aspect of (self-) care into our teaching practice?
We are not aware of any guidelines or propositions published so far addressing this by the universities we are teaching at – so we are curious: How is this being approached in your universities?

Students, what are your ideas, propositions, strategies you’d like institutions to implement or acknowledge? Educators, what are your strategies to care for yourself and your students?

We’d love to read your thoughts and suggestions, so we’ve decided to set-up this collaborative document focusing on (self-) care in the context of online teaching  – and we’d like to invite all of you to contribute, discuss and share experiences, resources etc.!


︎︎︎Ideas for teaching and learning design online


While universities are pushing the start of this year's summer semester* backward due to the spread of the COVID-19 virus, it remains unclear when university activities will return to normal.
*Writing from the perspective of Berlin, Germany, March 13, 2020

In order to continue teaching, online lectures seem to be an obvious solution. However, many teaching formats and seminars in design education rely on collaborative processes instead of one-directional lecture formats.

As we’re starting to write up alternative course plans to teach and learn collaboratively with our students online we’re wondering:
  • What tools are there to work on group assignments that are open source?
  • Can we translate our exercise on perspectives to a virtual format?
  • How can we translate teaching formats which are conceptualized to work in and with a space?
  • How can we for example play an introduction-game to get to know each other, via video-call?
  • What could be a fun way to present research to a group?
Mark