TUM Teaching Endowment Fund / Innovation Fund

The TUM Teaching Endowment Fund / Innovation Fund supports novel teaching and examination projects that contribute to the improvement and further development of formats, structures and content in the field of teaching or of examination methods – from the restructuring or redesign of courses and examinations to e-learning formats. It was awarded for the last time in 2018.

The target group of the TUM Teaching Endowment Fund was all members of TUM who are involved in teaching:

• Professors
• Scientific mid-level staff
• Lecturers
• Non-scientific employees who are responsible for the development of teaching and teaching formats.

Both individuals and teams were eligible to apply for funding. Paid degree programs (e.g. continuing education) or undergraduate teaching are not eligible for funding.

Funding were provided by the TUM: Agenda Lehre project, supported by the federal and state program for better study conditions and more quality in teaching (Qualitätspakt Lehre), that ended on 31.12.2020.

The TUM Teaching Endowment Fund / Innovation Fund supported teaching and examination projects that contribute to a creative and innovative improvement and further development of formats, structures and content in the field of teaching or of examination methods or that involve novel teaching or examination concepts. This covered a broad spectrum, including:

• e-learning elements or units
• Design or further development of competence-oriented examination formats
• Restructuring or redesign of courses / formats (for example, with regard to the main topics of individualization, internationalization)
• Innovative advising and supervision concepts
• Tutorials or internship formats

Within the framework of the TUM Teaching Endowment Fund / Innovation Fund, TUM professors who liked to realize a teaching project could be released from their teaching duties for the development period. In this case, the funds from the TUM Teaching Endowment Fund / Innovation Fund could be used for compensation.

A jury chaired by the Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs and including representatives of students, the academic staff, professors, and employees of TUM ProLehre Media and Didactics evaluated the applications received according to their eligibility for funding based on the following criteria:

• Formally complete and coherent application in terms of content.
• Long-term added value compared to existing teaching/learning offerings or examination methods, which is demonstrated, among other things, by the fact that
  • New things are tested or implemented
  • Innovative further development and sustainable improvement of existing methods
  • concepts, structures or didactic materials or experiences are created that can be used in the long term
  • the project can also be transferred to other courses.
• Gender and diversity aspects are taken into account (consideration of a heterogeneous student body)
• Success factors of good teaching are considered such as learning goal orientation, competencies orientation, experience orientation, activation, visualization, learner- and problem-solving-centeredness
• Inclusion of scientific research
• Efficiency through appropriate cost/benefit ratio
• Realistic implementation concept

The Innovation Fund was intended to support creative, department-spanning ideas with a focus on individualization, internationalization, competence-oriented testing and innovative study time models in order to develop best practices. In 2018, a joint call for proposals for the TUM Teaching Endowment Fund and the Innovation Fund was issued.

Innovation Fund Awardees 2016:

• Dr. Martin Buchschmid, TUM Department of Civil, Geo and Environmental Engineering
  Competence-oriented description of teaching content: Further development of a database-based concept for the competence-oriented description of teaching content as a basis for coherent module descriptions and aids for competence-oriented examination formats.

• Dr. Andreas Bauer, PD Dr. Friedrich Esch und Dr. Christoph Scheurer,TUM Department of Chemistry
  Marketplace of Opportunities – a Modern Natural Science Internship: In-depth, dynamic modularization of an interdisciplinary natural science internship to individualize a research-related teaching, learning, and examination environment for students and instructors based on modern, IT-supported procedures.

• Prof. Massimo Fornasier, TUM Department of Mathematics
  TUM Data Innovation Lab (TUM-DI-LAB): Establishing a Joint Lab on Big Data where students from all departments and local companies can collaborate on projects and share ideas with similar international labs.

• Prof. Pascal Berberat, TUM School of Medicine
  Competency-based testing in clinical teaching – What You Test Is What They Learn: Competency-based examination formats (including OSCE, MiniCEX and DOPS) are set up to match practical teaching and are firmly anchored in the medical school curriculum.