Ars legendi Awards
Each year, the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft grants the Ars legendi Award for excellent academic teaching at the suggestion of the German Rectors' Conference (HRK), as well as the Ars legendi Departmental Awards, which take up the approach and perpetuate the award in individual disciplines.
Ars legendi Award for Excellent Academic Teaching
The award is intended to highlight the special importance of academic teaching for the education of young academics. The award is intended to create a career-enhancing incentive to become involved in university teaching and to promote it beyond one's own sphere of influence. Until 2012, the award was presented in annually changing disciplines or subject groups. Since 2013, the concept has been realigned: Instead of a discipline or subject group, a specific teaching situation now forms the focus of the call for entries. The award is endowed with 30,000 euros.
The Ars legendi Award is one of the core elements in the Stifterverband's programmatic focus on raising the status of academic teaching. In addition, the quality of teaching is to be established as a central quality criterion for universities and profiled as a strategic goal of university quality management.
The current calls for entries for the Ars legendi Teaching Award can be found on the Stifterverband’s website.
Ars legendi Departmental Awards
Ars legendi departmental awards are awarded in four disciplines:
- Medicine: The first of these was the introduction in 2010 of an award for excellent teaching in university medicine. This is an award jointly presented by the Stifterverband and the Medizinischer Fakultätentag of the Federal Republic of Germany, which is endowed with 30,000 euros and awarded annually.
- Mathematics and Natural Sciences: In 2013, the Stifterverband, the German Mathematical Society, the German Physical Society, the German Chemical Society and the Association for Biology, Biosciences & Biomedicine in Germany offered an award for excellent university teaching in mathematics and the natural sciences for the first time. It is endowed with a total of 20,000 euros and is awarded annually in four categories: life sciences, chemistry, mathematics and physics.
- Sports Sciences: The Stifterverband and the Departments' Association for Sports Science, in cooperation with the German Association for Sports Science, are offering the Ars legendi department award for excellent university teaching in sports science for the first time in 2017. The prize is endowed with 10,000 euros.
- Engineering and Computer Science: Since 2019, the department award for engineering and computer science has been awarded every two years by the Stifterverband in cooperation with the Konferenz der Fachbereichstage (KFBT) The prize is endowed with 15,000 euros.
Further information on the individual faculty awards and the respective calls for entries can be found on the Stifterverband’s website.
TUM's Awardees
Enabling interactive learning even in large events, always actively involving students, and creating a link between theory and practice – these are components of success for Dr. Stephan Krusche's teaching, which was awarded the Ars legendi department award 2020.
For Stephan Krusche it is important that students try things out for themselves – only then can there be sustainable learning success. With the specially developed learning platform Artemis, students can submit programming tasks in large lectures and receive direct feedback on them through automatic tests. This also shows, for example, where mistakes were made. In addition to programming tasks, there are various quizzes and modeling tasks that can be used to test students' understanding of the subject matter. The learning platform is now used in several large basic computer science lectures.
Solving tasks in the lecture hall is one thing - but what about the concrete applicability of what has been learned in industrial practice? In order to give students a practical insight into the development of industrially applicable software, Stephan Krusche has therefore further developed the iPraktikum. In this practical course, real demanding projects are carried out in cooperation with renowned companies.
Stephan Krusche also plays a pioneering role by conducting his own teaching and learning research. Continuous improvement of teaching, based on student feedback, is his concern.
The award ceremony took place during a video conference on 23.07.2020. See the video of the award ceremony here.
If students attend a "candy lecture" or participate in a "reporter seminar," they are most likely students of Jürgen Richter-Gebert, who was awarded the Ars legendi award for excellent academic teaching in 2011.
The professor of geometry and visualization developed the course format to encourage students to actively engage with the scientific content of their mathematics studies and also to teach them skills such as self-reflection and teamwork. For Richter-Gebert, it is important to respond to each student individually and to provide continuous feedback on the level of performance.
To support and motivate students, he provides them with the self-developed accompanying material for his courses on the website www.mathe-vital.de and also develops teaching materials for his colleagues upon request. In addition, he designed the mathematics exhibition "ix-quadrat", which visually illustrates mathematical problems, and is involved in the program "Cinderella", an interactive geometry software.