In an interview for Bremen’s regional magazine buten un binnen, University of Bremen’s Vice Principal Academic, Prof. Dr. Thomas Hoffmeister, informed about what Bremen students at the University of Bremen will have to expect from the new winter semester which starts on November 2nd, 2020.

When asked whether there has been a decline in enrollment numbers, Hoffmeister states that there has been indeed a slight decline due to the fact that in Lower Saxony, a whole Abitur cohort wasn’t able to graduate due to the Corona measurements. Nevertheless, the decreased number of students who enrolled in study programs at the University of Bremen is not as big as they would have expected. This might be because gap years like Work-and-Travel-Years aren’t possible at the moment, so that school graduates were more likely to already start with University.

After the full-on online summer semester, Hoffmeister says that this new semester will see a dynamic, hybrid system: Next to the successful online-teaching formats, as long as the infection rates allow, more in-person classroom teaching will be made possible along with more opportunities for students to learn (together) on campus. With the new technical equipment the universities in the state of Bremen now have to deal with, Hoffmeister sees great potential in offering new student jobs for assisting in technological issues so that fruitful teaching can be secured.

Hoffmeister assures that if teaching will have to move back online, presence teaching will not be translated one-to-one into online teaching but will be made more flexible with asynchronous learning styles, for example.