The promotion of students through excellent teaching programmes is one of the key objectives of TU Graz. To emphasise the importance of imparting knowledge and skills, TU Graz awards the annual prize for excellence in teaching. The prize recognises up to three lecturers or teams of lecturers who have offered their courses with outstanding commitment, a didactic concept of excellence and, above all, a great deal of motivation.
The award winners and their courses in 2023/2024:
Christina Johanna Hopfe and Robert Scot McLeod
(Lecture with integrated exercise: “Low carbon building design and communities”)
“In the lecture with integrated exercise Low Carbon Building Design and Communities, the lecturers succeed in conveying a topic at the cutting edge and with strong practical relevance to students using a didactically diverse teaching concept,” concluded the jury, explaining the reasons for the award. “In addition to excellently prepared theoretical principles, the lecturers make use of excursions to promote a deeper understanding of the topic of sustainability in engineering education. This is also confirmed by students’ extraordinarily positive course evaluations.”
Mario Hirz
(Lecture: “Embedded Mechatronics Architectures”)
“Diversity, inclusion and a sustainable teaching concept which is updated annually in line with changing developments in industry and research are integral cornerstones of the Embedded Mechatronics Architectures course. No less noteworthy are the lecturer’s enthusiastic knowledge transfer and didactic concept, which, despite the large number of participants, gives the course an interactive character by way of a large number of group assignments. At the same time, this promotes interculturality through a significant proportion of international students,” summarised the jury in praise of Mario Hirz’s performance.
Christoph Aistleitner, Lorenz Frühwirth and Athanasios Sourmelidis
(Lecture with integrated exercise: “Analysis 1 for computer science studies”)
“At the beginning of a bachelor’s degree programme, students are often confronted with many theoretically oriented basic subjects that require a lot of work. In addition, very different levels of prior knowledge come together, especially in the first semester. The lively, humorous and technically excellent way in which the complex subject area of the course Analysis 1 for Computer Science Studies was presented by the team of lecturers to first-semester students from four different fields of study is therefore to be regarded as outstanding,” read the jury’s statement. “This makes an important contribution to harmonising different levels of knowledge and helping to shape a successful start to students’ studies.”
How the prize-winners are determined
Courses can be nominated by students who have taken part in them as well as by deans of studies and study representatives of TU Graz. A jury selects the courses of excellence from the nominations on the basis of the teaching concept, course description, implementation of the teaching concept, results of the course evaluation and examination results. The jury consists of the Vice Rector for Academic Affairs (chair), representatives of the Student Union, the Senate, the Senate’s Curricula Commission for bachelor’s and master’s programmes and the sponsors of the prizes.
The prize money of 3,000 euros per course was donated by alumniTUGraz 1887, the Styrian Chamber of Labour and IV Steiermark (listed in alphabetical order).
