Teaching an information retrieval (IR) course for three different target groups is challenging. These target groups are i) resident students at the University of Bamberg, Germany ii) remote full-time students from other Bavarian universities, and iii) remote but part-time students from all parts of Germany which usually study the course besides their day-to-day work relationship. As a consequence, we have participants with heterogeneous previous knowledge and potentially different expectations with respect to the course content.
In this paper we will only briefly describe the didactic aspects and challenges of the course. The clear focus of the paper lies on an in-depth quantitative evaluation how various IR topics presented in the lectures and tutorials fit the needs of the different target groups. We evaluate interestingness and importance of the course topics according to the students' impressions. The goal of the evaluation is to get hints for future refinements of IR course content---in general but also with respect to the needs of different target groups.