The current state and impact of Covid‐19 on digital higher education in Germany

Abstract This case study looks at the effects of the Covid‐19 pandemic on teaching and learning at universities in Germany. It examines the question of whether the current practice of Emergency Remote Teaching in the online term 2020 will lead to an acceleration of the digitalization of teaching and learning, and on what we can build upon in this development. In the light of the state of digital higher education in Germany and international experience in the field of distance education, as well as organizational support structures, the results of a longitudinal study on the media use behavior of students will be presented. While the acceptance of e‐learning tools was slightly declining before the Covid‐19 outbreak, it is to be assumed that the demand for digital offers will rather increase. Despite some reluctant reactions, it can be assumed that the current situation will have a positive effect on digital innovations in university teaching in Germany due to the pressure of the crisis, the great commitment of many teachers, and raised expectations.

enormous efforts in a very short time to make an online summer term 2020 possible within weeks. Investments were made in a technically stable infrastructure. Many lecturers have put a lot of effort and commitment into setting up online modules, recording interactive videos, developing learning materials and tests, creating learning paths, moderating forums and holding consultation hours via video conferencing.
Suddenly the Learning Management System is no longer used only for course management or as a place to provide readings and presentations, but really as a teaching and learning environment. However, there are also examples of courses in which the 90-min lecture including its 70 slides is transmitted 1:1 by video or in which teachers meet their students in a synchronized setting in a video conference room at regular class hours.
There is no doubt that the current situation triggers a great deal of pressure in the direction of digital teaching and also leads to a steep learning curve for many faculty members, which pushes forward competence development processes. Massive investments are being made in the technical infrastructure, teachers are acquiring media technology knowledge and taking advantage of the services provided by educational consultants and instructional designers. Examinations and tests are carried out with the help of computers (e-assessment) and some university presidents and vice-presidents probably have become painfully aware of the value of their Center for Teaching and Learning.
What will remain of it after the pandemic is completely unclear. It is likely that many teachers will return to their usual classroom teaching as quickly as possible, although they may wish to continue to use the materials and resources they have created and develop them further in order to make their teaching more flexible and interactive. In a survey on the digital summer term 2020 at the University of Oldenburg in Germany, 74% (n = 296) of the lecturers stated that their workload was significantly higher or higher compared to previous semesters. 19% (n = 63) would like to see fully online teaching for the 2020/21 winter semester, 42% (n = 138) would prefer partly online and classroom teaching, and 39% (n = 131) would like to see classroom teaching as far as possible. The survey was carried out by the Department of Academic Affairs (internal evaluation) from July 06 to 26, 2020. From 1.700 faculty members and lecturers who had been contacted, 509 questionnaires were submitted (response rate 29.9%).
This paper reports on current developments in Summer 2020 towards the digitization of higher education in Germany that are accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. The case study is based on empirical data describing the pre-pandemic situation and a documental analysis of reports and policy papers in the context of the German higher education institutions.
If we assume that the current situation can be an opportunity for the digitalization of teaching and learning in higher education, then the question arises on what we can build upon. In distance education, learning and teaching has always been facilitated by media and educational technology, since learning here is only made possible at all by media (cf. Peters, 1997). Against this background, the aim of this paper is to shed light on current developments from this perspective and also in an international context in order to benefit from the experience and knowledge gained from the practice and research of distance education.
Furthermore, the question arises how students deal with the sudden digitization and how they can be reached with the digital modes of delivery. Which digital devices, media and tools do they have access to? How are these used for learning during their studies and how do students assess the usefulness for this purpose? There is no current data available on this, but the results of a longitudinal study on the media usage behavior of students, which was carried out in 2012, 2015, and 2018 (N = 5,572), will be summarized here in order to provide initial insights. Despite all the discussions, numerous other project funding (for an overview of e-learning funding in Germany, see e-teaching. org, 2019) and also some innovative developments, for example in the context of part-time courses of study and university continuing education (see Arnold, Zawacki-Richter, Haubenreich, Röbken, & Götter, 2017;Hanft & Brinkmann, 2013;Hanft, Zawacki-Richter, & Gierke, 2015) as well as in the area of distance teaching institutions (Bernath & Stöter, 2018), it can be stated that a sustainable integration of digital media has not taken place across the entire range of higher education. In a study on the state of digitalization of universities in Germany, for example, just 1.7% of the universities surveyed (n = 116) rated the state of digitalization of teaching and learning as well advanced. There is a large discrepancy between the importance of digitalization as perceived by university management and the current implementation (Gilch et al., 2019, p. 29 f.).
However, it is noticeable that the pressure to innovate and change on brick and mortar universities has increased as a result of the general digital transformation that affects all areas of society (cf. Stalder, 2016). Digitalization is seen as the key to innovation in the European Higher Education Area (Rampelt, Orr, & Knoth, 2019). In general, there is widespread skepticism about digitalization in Germany, which is associated with an investment backlog in the area of digital infrastructure. In the "Index of Readiness for Digital Lifelong Learning" of the Centre for European Policies Studies (CEPS), Germany ranks last in a European comparison: "Germany's last-place finish is remarkable, but perhaps less so for those closely paying attention to digital trends. Germany has come under scrutiny for under-investment in digital infrastructure. Attitudes are also important, and Germans tend to be skeptical towards digital technologies" (CEPS, 2019, p. iv).

| International experience: Online Distance Education
Against the background of the current discussion on the implementation of digital learning and teaching, a déjà-vu effect can arise if one thinks of the origins of distance learning and computer-based learning.
In the corresponding research and practice communities, discussions about electronic or digital forms of learning have been going on since at least the mid-1990s. The focus is basically on the organizational prerequisites for sustainable implementation, even if the terms used in the debates have changed over the years: computer-based learning, distance education, online learning, e-learning, blended learning, technology-enhanced learning, and now remote learning. For example, the book "Delivering Digitally-Managing the Transition to the Knowledge Media" (Inglis, Ling & Joosten, 2000) is more than 20 years old, but the topics are still spot on: teaching in electronic learning environments, technological infrastructures, organizational and human resources development, student support systems and aspects of quality assurance.
Institutions of distance education have always been spearheading in the adaptation of new media, since teaching and learning in distance learning is only made possible by media. Two-way media are a constitutive element of distance learning, as they support direct, synchronous and asynchronous exchange between teachers and learners (Keegan, 1980). Distance education can look back on a long history (see Delling, 1992;Dieckmann & Zinn, 2017). The first university to offer distance learning was the University of London in 1858, and the first dedicated distance teaching university was the University of South Africa, founded in Pretoria in 1875. Since about the middle of the 20th century, distance education research has established itself with its own journals and professional societies (see Delling, 1971;Zawacki-Richter & Naidu, 2016). Therefore, we can benefit from the theory, research and practice in online teaching and student support in distance education for the development of digital education at on-campus universities.

Qayyum and Zawacki-Richter (2018) and Zawacki-Richter and
Qayyum (2019)  universities in particular is the importance of planning and integrating support services from the outset into the overall design of the institution" (Brindley & Paul, 1996, p. 49). Here we can distinguish between administrative-institutional services of the support system in the broad sense (e.g., student counselling, library services) and the support of the learning process in the narrow sense (e.g., in online tutorials).
Personal contact between teachers and students or among students is also of critical importance for the success of online learning. Digital . Selected results will be presented here.

| Access to digital devices and Internet use
In all three years of the survey, more than 99% of students stated that they had Internet access at home. While in 2012 only just over half had a smartphone with mobile Internet access, this figure was 98% in 2018. Students estimate that they use the Internet for an average of four hours a day.
Overall, students are very well equipped with digital devices.
On average, they have five different end devices. While stationary devices (desktop PCs, printers, scanners) have become less and less important over the years, mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular (e.g., smartphones +42% or tablets +34%, see Table 1).
This development leads to the assumption that technologyenhanced learning is predominantly carried out via mobile devices, which is also confirmed by Lee, Leow, and Kong (2019) from the Asian region and in the ECAR 2019 Report  According to the media typology of Grosch and Gidion (2011) and Grosch (2014)  In the current practice of Emergency Remote Teaching it can be observed that very often synchronous video conferences (e.g., with BigBlueButton or Zoom) are carried out and lectures or presentations are recorded as videos and made available on the learning platform. Previously, the acceptance of these formats in particular was very low. Synchronous webinars with video conferencing systems ranked 31st, 29th, and 30th in 2018. Especially the tendency in the acceptance of lecture recordings was negative: they fell from 12th to 34th and finally to 43rd place. However, international studies have shown that students do appreciate lecture recordings 3.3 | Supply and demand: desire for digital teaching/learning formats The study by Wilkesmann, Virgillito, Bröcker, and Knopp (2012) with Germany students has already shown that experience with e-learning also significantly increases the demand and desire for e-learning. In addition to the frequency of use and the perceived benefit of media, tools and services for learning in higher education, the students were also asked, following Kerres, Hanft, Wilkesmann, and Wolff-Bendiik (2012), how important the use of digital teaching and learning formats is for them in the courses relevant to them (demand) and how often these teaching and learning formats are actually used in studies (supply).
Z-standardized values were used for the direct comparison of the offered formats (Table 3)

| CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER PERSPECTIVES
Whether there will be a fundamental innovation or change of university teaching triggered by the Covid-19 outbreak, seems questionable. Representative studies on the practice of Emergency Remote Teaching are not available for Germany: "It seems that we probably will not have this data in the near future, because planned or approved projects on the topic do not seem to be in sight" (Kerres, 2020, p. 3f.).
Even the term emergency remote teaching, which has found rapid proliferation in contrast to online, blended or distance learning, indicates that this is something that one would like to leave behind as quickly as possible. In an open letter "In Defence of Presence Teaching", more than 6,000 university teachers "point out the danger that the current situation could cause the traditional presence formats to lose the appreciation and support of university management, education ministries and politics, a support that they will urgently need in the post-Corona period" (https://www.praesenzlehre.com, sixth paragraph). The authors speak of a threat to face-to-face teaching and present digital teaching as a danger.
One can argue a great deal about whether academic discourse is also possible in digital learning spaces (see the wonderful essay "Text that talk back" by Thomas Hülsmann, 2003). This is certainly also related to the respective subject culture. Conspicuously, many of the signatories of the open letter come from the humanities, cultural studies and linguistics, and also from the natural sciences. Particularly in subjects with a high proportion of laboratory work and internships, a rapid switch to digital is hardly feasible. Such developments are complex, time-consuming and costly, but nevertheless possible, as is shown, for example, by the work of Dietmar Kennepohl (Kennepohl, 2016;Kennepohl & Shaw, 2010) at the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Athabasca University (Canada's Open University).
A discussion about saving face-to-face teaching is certainly a phantom debate, because there is basically no sign that face-to-face teaching is being questioned or that all universities are suddenly turning into distance learning universities.
However, it should not be argued here that "e-learning" is better than face-to-face learning. Rather, it should be emphasized that there are always advantages and disadvantages, pros and cons of using digital media in teaching and learning. For some target groups, access to higher education is only made possible by digital formats independent of time and space. Digital media and tools may afford "a different kind of learning" (Kerres, 2018, p. 6) with a variety of materials that can be self-directed, cooperative, interactive, problem-oriented, and flexible in order to prepare students for a digital world. However, it is always necessary to decide on a case-by-case basis what kind of pedagogical added value digital media offer, depending on the needs of the target group and the content to be taught.
In the current situation, many have put a lot of effort into converting their lectures and seminars into a digital format and have shown great flexibility in order to make it possible for most students to study.
This effort should not be in vain. Many lecturers would like to continue to use the developed materials when we are hopefully back to normal in the near future. In a very short time, a lot has been invested in the technical infrastructure, and many university administrators have realized that centers of excellence for digital teaching can be relevant to the system and need to be better equipped.
On the part of students, too, the experience with remote learning could lead, as empirical research has shown, to a greater desire for digital learning and also raise a certain level of expectation. A further survey of student media usage is planned for 2021. It will be very interesting to see if and how students' media usage patterns have changed.
Based on the mixed situation described here, I would be tempted to predict that the current situation will provide a certain boost to the

CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The author declares that he has no competing interests.