Anyone who went to university will remember certain faculty members whose way of teaching made a particular impact on them. The University just presented this year’s Awards for Excellence in Teaching to eleven such lecturers.
The jury's decisions were based on student nominations and assessments. Prof. Dr Andrea Strübind, Vice President for Studying and Teaching, said: "With this award we also aim to encourage reflection on teaching and learning processes at the university. We were delighted with the large number of very positive assessments from our students." She explained that this year the jury had therefore decided to present seven awards, each including 1,000 euros in prize money, to eleven lecturers.
The award in the "Best Course" category went to Prof. Dr Stefan Debener, Dr Cornelia Kranczioch and Dr Martin Georg Bleichner from the Department of Psychology for a seminar in the Master’s programme Neurocognitive Psychology about cognitive rehabilitation in the face of neurological troubles like attention deficits after a stroke or memory lapses. The three lecturers took it in turns to teach selected approaches interactively using different methods. "The students have plenty to do in the seminar, they can contribute their own knowledge – and they think that's cool," said a delighted Bleichner, speaking for the award-winning trio. The seminar titled "Cognitive Neurorehabilitation" had thus provided "many aha moments" and all three lecturers had a lot of fun with it, he added – which they obviously passed on to the students.
"Statistics for Biology" was the title of a prize-winning lecture and practical module held by Prof. Dr Jutta Kretzberg and Daniela Antonia Schwarz which scored points with students thanks to its very diversity-sensitive design, among other things. "Biology students and their prior knowledge, requirements and learning strategies are just as varied as the data sets they must learn to analyse," the two lecturers from the Department of Neuroscience emphasised. Kretzberg and Schwarz combined several different approaches to the topic of statistics and offered their interactive course in a hybrid format to enable students with family commitments or health problems to also participate. The jury chose this course as the winner in the "Designing learning spaces" category for its diverse use of digital resources.
In an introductory seminar in experimental philosophy held by Dr Alexander Max Bauer and Dr Stephan Kornmesser from the Institute of Philosophy, students went through an entire research process of the type used in areas such as empirical social research. This field of inquiry combines philosophical questions with empirical methods from social sciences research or psychology. Based on a well-known study and later on their own research questions, the participants learned about empirical research as well as about "a comparatively young philosophical movement that has so far been little represented in university teaching in Germany", as Bauer and Kornmesser explained. The jury praised the way the lecturers guided and supported the master's students through the course – including giving them the opportunity to publish their findings on topics such as autonomous driving or civil disobedience in a blog. The seminar won the prize in the "Research-based learning" category.
This year, the university awarded four prizes to lecturers who performed particularly well in the regular evaluations of courses and submitted their results for consideration. In the category "Best Course Evaluation", the jury presented two awards for seminars and lectures with 40 or more participants, and two for those with fewer than 40 participants. Prof. Dr Julia Wurr from the Institute for English and American Studies ("Global Health, Biocapitalism and Literature") and Prof. Dr Jens Christoffers from the Institute of Chemistry ("Structure elucidation of organic compounds") had the highest scores in the smaller course category. In the larger course category, educationalist Dr Juliane Schlesier shone with her course "Teaching and Learning through Engagement in Primary School", and medical scientist Dr Nader El-Sourani achieved very good results with his surgery lecture for fourth-year medical students.
The University of Oldenburg has been honouring lecturers for their outstanding teaching and innovative course designs since 1998. The Awards for Excellence in Teaching 2023/24 were sponsored by the Universitätsgesellschaft Oldenburg e.V. (UGO).
