Corona – Information for physics students
Dear all,
we want to give you an update on the current status of the preparations of the physics lectures related to the Covid-19 virus.
The most important information is that all lectures offered by physics will be happening.
Lectures will be mainly done as screencasts via studon and the video portal of the university, partly also as live streams. This includes lectures with experiments, in the past weeks the Department has gone through an effort to equip the lecture halls in a way that we can film all experiments.
Detailed information about all lectures will be given to you via studon in this or next week, lectures will start on 20 April. For this reason you should register with the respective courses that you want to attend as soon as possible, such that you can be informed. This is already possible. You will be able to find the studon links through univis or by a search in studon. If you do not find it, please contact the person responsible for the course. We ask for your understanding that some information has to be sent on short notice and possibly only after Easter. Unfortunately, the current situation is very fluid and there is no other way.
In many lectures we also foreseen interactive sessions via zoom.
In case it will be possible to have “face on” lectures later in the semester, some of the courses will switch to this mode, while others will remain as video lectures.
Exercises will be done interactively via zoom.
Seminars depend more on direct interaction than lectures, for this reason these will probably have a delayed start. If possible at that time, they will be done as in-class seminars, if not via zoom.
For obvious reasons, the big unknown right now are the laboratories. We are still hoping to find a solution, but this is strongly dependent on the further developments with respect to Covid-19, which cannot be assessed in a reliable way right now. We are considering either labs in the 2nd half of the semester (given that the teaching period has been prolonged to the start of August), block labs, or rescheduling of labs to later semesters. Please wait a bit more, we will inform you.
For examinations related to the lectures a new set of legal regulations will be passed by the University which provides significant flexibility. We are therefore unable at this moment to make explicit statements on the mode of the exams, but we can assure you that we will be finding realistic solutions.
For those of you who had planned to start their BSc or MSc thesis work. Please talk to your advisors. There are projects where you can start your research without physical access to university resources – and you should start these – while for others the situation is more difficult. It is clear, however, that delays in the start of the thesis work will NOT be counted in a negative way with respect, e.g., to the maximum number of semesters in a course.
Finally: We know that not all of you might have stable Internet access with sufficient bandwidth. If you think that you will be having problems to follow online-courses for this or other reasons, please contact ulrike.graupner@fau.de. We will then work with you to find a solution.
With our best regards,
Joern Wilms, speaker of the department
Christopher van Eldik, dean of studies
Kai Schmidt, vice-speaker of the department