Handke originally studied English, sports, and philosophy to become a teacher at Universität Hannover from 1975 to 1980 and did his postgraduate in linguistics at the University of Reading from 1981 to 1983.

From 1984 to 1991 Handke was a research assistant at Universität Wuppertal, where he wrote his habilitation dissertation Natural Language Processing and Implementation in LISP under the supervision of Gisa Rauh in 1990.

Additionally, Handke is an advisor to several German state governments and a member of the national board "Hochschulforum Digitalisierung".

[citation needed] Handke began to use digital and interactive teaching methods in the form of CD-ROMs in the early 1990s.

[2] The VLC offers a wide variety of courses on linguistics, ranging from introductory to more advanced material.