A pioneer of digital teaching and way ahead of his time, Handke started to introduce innovative, digital, and interactive teaching methods in the form of CD-Roms in the early 1990s. This new way of teaching resulted in the creation of the world’s first and largest e-learning platform for linguistics, the Virtual Linguistics Campus. The VLC offers more than 250 fully certified linguistic courses and course material for theoretical and applied linguistics, ranging from introductory classes such as Phonology, Morphology, Syntax und Semantics to highly specialized courses such as ‘The Use of English in Lyrics, ‘The Language and Culture of the Uyghur people’ and ‘Massive Open Online Courses’. Currently, the VLC has more than 15,000 active users with more than 3,000 visitors daily. In 2013, Handke started the Virtual Linguistics Campus YouTube channel, now the largest linguistics channel in the world with almost 3 million clicks and more than 38,000 users and more than 500 videos, which all involve the CC BY licensing model. In 2017, Handke has started integrating humanoid robots into his in-class scenarios as part of his government funded project
Published works
Since 2012, Handke has published several books about modern teaching. The most influential ones are 2012 'E-Learning, E-Teaching and E-Assessment', 2014 'Patient Hochschullehre' and 2015 'Handbuch Hochschullehre Digital'. Similarly to his videos on ‘Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century’, ‘Patient Hochschullehre’ heavily criticizes the methods typically used by universities and colleges to teach content as well as their inability to adapt to their target group.
Music career
Alongside his academic work, Handke is also a musician and has been playing music since his early teenage years. In the 1970s, he played with Matthias Jabs and Hannes Folberth amongst others in a band called ‘Deadlock'. The band split in 1977 because Handke decided to solely focus on Linguistics and went to England. One of their old recordings has been published on YouTube. This recording was produced "live" in Deadlock's rehearsal room and recorded on a two-track reel-to-reel machine. Handke himself commented: ‘We were young and enthusiastic at the time and the music reflects the heavy rock of the roaring 1970s.’
Accolades
In 2013, Handke received the highest Hessian Teaching and Learning Award for his Inverted Classroom Mastery Model. In October 2015, he was awarded the highest German teaching award, Ars Legendi Prize for Digital Teaching and Learning. In 2016, he was awarded the Adult Teaching Innovation Award for his MOOC #DEU4ARAB, a contrastive pronunciation course for Arabic refugees in Germany. In 2017 Handke and his team won the national OER award with their MOOC #FIT4UNI.
Criticism
Like many pioneers of various scientific areas, Handke has to fight skeptics. Only two of his co-workers congratulated Handke on his "Excellency in Higher Education" Award, MMOCs are being withheld altogether.
Publications
Descriptive and Psycholinguistics Aspects of Adverbial Subordinate Clauses. Julius Groos Verlag, Heidelberg 1984, .
Sprachverarbeitung mit LISP und PROLOG auf dem PC. Vieweg, Wiesbaden 1987,.
Natürliche Sprache: Theorie und Implementierung in LISP. McGraw-Hill, Hamburg 1989,.
The Structure of the Lexicon: Human versus Machine.Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin 1995,.
