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The COVID-19 crisis influenced universities worldwide in early 2020. In Austria, all universities were closed in March 2020 as a preventive measure, and meetings with over 100 people were banned and a curfew was imposed. This development also had a massive impact on teaching, which in Austria takes place largely face-to-face. In this paper we would like to describe the situation of an Austrian university regarding e-learning before and during the first three weeks of the changeover of the teaching system, using the example of Graz University of Technology (TU Graz). The authors provide insights into the internal procedures, processes and decisions of their university and present figures on the changed usage behaviour of their students and teachers. As a theoretical reference, the article uses the e-learning readiness assessment according to Alshaher (2013), which provides a framework for describing the status of the situation regarding e-learning before the crisis. The paper concludes with a description of enablers, barriers and bottlenecks from the perspective of the members of the Educational Technology department.

Wikis are a website technology for mass collaborative authoring. Today, wikis are increasingly used for educational purposes. Basically, the most important asset of wikis is free and easy access for end users: everybody can contribute, comment and edit-following the principles of Universal access. Consequently, wikis are ideally suited for collaborative learning and a number of studies reported a great success of wikis in terms of active participation, collaboration, and a rapidly growing content. However, the wikis success in education was often linked either to direct incentives or even pressure. This paper strongly argues that this contradicts the original intentions of wikis and, furthermore, weakens the psycho-pedagogical impact. A study is presented which focuses on investigating the success of wikis in higher education, when students are neither enforced to contribute nor directly rewarded similar to the principles of Wikipedia. Amazingly, the results show that, in total, none of the N = 287 students created new articles or edited existing ones during a whole semester. It is concluded that the use of Wiki-Systems in educational settings is much more complicated, and it needs more time to develop a kind of ''give-and-take'' generation.

This paper describes a follow-up Web 2.0 approach to a technology enhanced master course for students of Graz University of Technology. The lecture “Social Aspects of Information Technology” has a long tradition for using new didactical scenarios as well as modern e-Learning technologies. After using a blogosphere one year ago, this year microblog channels helped to expand the traditional lecture. Students choose (on a voluntary basis) whether they want to participate in a blogging/microblogging group instead of using conventional methods called Scientific Writer/Scientific Reviewer. This study addresses the question whether this method can change the learning outcome into a more reflective one. Furthermore, peer-reviewing groups judge the quality of essays and blog contributions. In this paper we examine if microblogging can be an appropriate technology for assisting the process. This publication comes to the conclusion that an amazing potential and a new way to work with information is opened when using microblogging. Students seem to be more engaged, reflective and critical in as much as they presented much more personal statements and opinions than years before