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This paper questions the transformational potential of teaching with digital technologies in elementary school by ethnographically examining the use of telepresence robots – which promise new forms of teaching ‚being there‘ – in terms of how it is carried out: How is teaching performatively processed with students who have a physical presence in the classroom even though they are at home? With the hardware „avatars“ a networked showing is observed, on the basis of which practices are analysed as a distributed network event (whose entanglements have been expanded by digitalisation). At the same time, and in contrast, it becomes visible how an increasingly incompatible instructional order is produced, which, for example, endeavors to demonstratively assign performance attributions and associated agency to single individuals. In the process, the accompanying practices experience an actualisation of meaning in contact with the digital, for example, when the teacher‘s tasks or questions seem to be more about demonstrating knowledge and this is instead used as a vehicle for situationally demonstrative practice or exemplification of the functional order of instruction under more difficult conditions: The contrast between the new and the old is used to emphasise the contours of the traditional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current considerations on the design of effective teaching in higher education frequently revolve around the choice of a suitable format, i.e., how and to what extent teaching should (also) continue to take place in the digital realm. This paper is based on a systematic literature review of N = 44 meta-analyses (publication period 2011--2022) on the learning-related effectiveness of the teaching formats online teaching, blended learning (including flipped classroom) in comparison with traditional face-to-face teaching. The results provide an evidence-based foundation for recommendations on the use of the formats in higher education teaching. Predominantly small positive effects of the teaching formats on cognitive learning outcomes, practical skills, and student assessments are found. Rarely, medium effects are reported, with blended learning formats showing a slight advantage over online and traditional face-to-face teaching. The magnitude of effect sizes also depends on the inclusion criteria of the meta-analyses. Furthermore, the moderator analyses indicate that additional variance is explained in particular by design features that can be modified by teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the German educational digitalization agenda. In autumn 2016, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) published the strategy paper "Educational Offensive for the Digital Knowledge Society" as a systematic framework for the dissemination of digital education in Germany.