The COVID-19 pandemic has brought universities to a new situation. Some students were unable to complete their internship or semester abroad as planned, and this led to an increase in the number of students participating in classes at their home institution. Also, the courses that used to take place in-person needed to be transformed to online courses with the consequent lack of the traditional interactions among students and lecturers, so new approaches, which are often supervision intensive, are needed to keep the students engaged. Therefore, we developed a Train-the-Trainer concept by designing a model based on coaching, peer-tutoring, and learning exchanges. Here we are expanding the traditional tutor concept to assure the following overarching goals:
1. Providing the course participants with intensive small-scaled supervision during the online teaching sessions.
2. Giving more responsibility to more senior students, the ‘Junior Coaches’, to deepen their knowledge.
We have applied this model in two case studies and have evaluated the concept based on a Mixed Methods Research Design. The results showed that all three user groups of Lecturers, Junior Coach and course participants appreciated this approach.
