The University has presented six lecturers with its Award for Excellence in Teaching for the 2022/23 academic year. The jury was impressed by the quality of the courses in the fields of economics, history and computer science.
With its Awards for Excellence in Teaching, the University of Oldenburg honours exceptional contributions in teaching and thus promotes the debate on teaching and learning processes at the University. “It is not the topic but the teaching concept that is decisive for this award. Nonetheless, it is important to us as a university that students deal with socially relevant issues in their studies,” said Prof. Dr. Karsten Speck, Vice President for Instruction and International Affairs and patron of the awards, commenting on the selection of two courses on the subject of sustainability for the award.
In the Best Course category, the award went to Prof. Dr. Christian Busse and Satwant Dahiya from the Department of Business Administration, Economics and Law. In the course Sustainable Supply Chain Management, Busse and Dahiya used case studies to teach students the fundamentals of sustainable supply chains and how they can be organised. The jury was impressed by the diverse teaching concept, the thorough and critical analysis of the topic and the way the module has been constantly improved on the basis of student feedback.
In the Research Workshop: Dilemmas of Sustainability, taught by Dr. Hendrik Wolter and Sophie Berg – also from the Department of Business Administration, Economics and Law – students explored the dilemmas of sustainable development in research projects which they themselves designed. The jury was impressed with the way the instructors encouraged the students to work independently and adopt a structured approach, and gave the course the award in the Research-Based Learning category.
The University also presented two awards to lecturers who excelled in the routine evaluation of courses. In the category Courses with Fewer than 40 Participants, Dr. Franziska Meifort from the Institute of History Meifort received the award for her course titled Bremen und die Alkoholfrage um 1900 (Bremen and the Alcohol Issue around 1900), while in the category Courses with 40 or More Participants, the award went to Prof. Dr. Andreas Peter for his lecture titled Introduction to IT Security.
With its awards, the University of Oldenburg has been honouring the work of lecturers who make an exceptional contribution in teaching since 1998. In this year, the University had once more asked students to nominate courses which they considered to be outstanding for the award, each of which comes with 1,000 euros in prize money. The Awards for Excellence in Teaching 2022/23 were sponsored by the Universitätsgesellschaft Oldenburg e. V. (UGO). The award ceremony took place as part of the Teaching and Learning Day celebrations.