It was February 2020 and I had just returned from abroad. The extra health screening measures at the airport seemed excessive, but the situation was escalating closer to home too. Back at work at the Medical University of Innsbruck, I met with the Executive Vice President for Teaching and Study Matters to assess concerns over the growing pandemic. Until then, online learning wasn’t the norm for the university, nor was it a subject of conversation. As a medical university, our courses involve a lot of lab and hands-on activities, and training of clinical skills, which fit into our traditional in-classroom experience. We operate a learning management system, ILIAS, which is similar to Moodle or Blackboard. Professors used ILIAS primarily to make course material, like lecture slides available.
