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 purpose of the award is 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 call 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 various disciplines:
- Medicine: The prize is awarded jointly by the Stifterverband and the Medizinische Fakultätentag, is endowed with 20,000 euros and has been awarded annually since 2010.
- 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. The prize is awarded annually in four categories (life sciences, chemistry, mathematics and physics) and is endowed with 5,000 euros for each category.
- Sports Science: The Stifterverband and the Fakultätentag Sportwissenschaft, in cooperation with the German Association for Sports Science, offer the Ars legendi award for excellent university teaching in sports science. The prize is endowed with 10,000 euros.
- Engineering and Computer Science: The Faculty Prize in Engineering and Computer Science was awarded every three years between 2011 and 2020 by the Stifterverband in cooperation with the umbrella organisation Fakultätentage (4ING). The prize was endowed with 25,000 euros.
- Forestry and Forest Sciences: The Stifterverband, the Forstliche Fakultätentag and the Fachbereichstag of the Forestry Universities of Applied Sciences have joined forces in 2024 with the Sattelmühle-Stiftung to award a prize for excellent university teaching in forestry. The prize is endowed with 15,000 euros.
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 they achieve lasting learning success. With the specially developed learning platform Artemis, students can submit programming tasks in large lectures and receive direct feedback through automatic tests. For example, it also shows where mistakes have been 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 thepracitcal application 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 further developed the iPraktikum. In this practical course, real and challenging projects are carried out in cooperation with renowned companies.
Stephan Krusche also plays a pioneering role by conducting his own teaching and learning research. His aim is to continuously improve teaching based on student feedback.
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.