Ernst Otto Fischer Teaching Award

The Ernst Otto Fischer Teaching Award honors up to three innovative and successful teaching projects implemented at TUM each round. The award thus recognizes the commitment of outstanding lecturers in university teaching.

The Award

The aim of the award is to recognize particularly successful projects for improving teaching at TUM in a way that attracts public attention. Therefore, each round the Ernst Otto Fischer Teaching Award is given to up to three instructors or instruction teams at TUM who have implemented a particularly innovative project for the improvement and further development of teaching.

The Ernst Otto Fischer Teaching Award is an honorary award that does not come with an endowment. The winners receive a certificate with the award of the Ernst Otto Fischer Teaching Award and are honored university-wide and with publicity by presenting the implemented teaching concepts on various platforms.

Both individuals and teaching teams can receive the Ernst Otto Fischer Teaching Award. The prerequisite for receiving the award is the successful implementation of an innovative teaching concept. In 2021, the annual selection will for the last time include all teaching projects that have received funding from the TUM Teaching Fund, implemented the project and produced a final report.

In addition, an application is possible from persons who have carried out an innovative teaching concept outside of the TUM Teaching Fund. These must submit a project description as well as an implementation and evaluation report of the teaching concept.

Applications can be submitted throughout the year through the TUM Center for Study and Teaching.

Ernst Otto Fischer

Ernst Otto Fischer (10.11.1918 to 23.07.2007) worked at the Chair of Inorganic Chemistry at TUM for twenty years as a full professor. For decades, the scientist founded modern organometallic chemistry as well as numerous fields of application and led the department to worldwide success.

For his pioneering work in the study of metal-organic sandwich complexes, Ernst Otto Fischer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1973 together with the Briton Geoffrey Wilkinson.

Ernst Otto Fischer demonstrated that excellent research and excellent teaching are two sides of the same coin: His students honor him as a great academic teacher who gave impulses, encouraged and made people think.

A portrait photo of Ernst Otto Fischer TUM
Chemist Ernst Otto Fischer

Awardees of 2021

Maximilian Trübswetter from the TUM Department of Mechanical Engineering  for the project “‘connecTUM’ – Networked Teaching in the
Basic Studies in Mechanical Engineering”: The focus of the teaching concept is a central mechanical engineering system that links the bachelor modules and accompanies the students through the basic studies in the sense of a common thread. At the end of a multi-stage selection process involving those involved and the student representatives, the choice fell on an urban ropeway system. The ropeway installation offers great potential for the systematic and overarching networking of teaching in the bachelor's program. The interaction of mechanical and electr(on)ic components, sensors, software, and control devices allows for a better interdisciplinary teaching of the fundamentals of mechanical engineering. The interdisciplinary interlacing enables the students to deal with topics at the interfaces of the disciplines.

Prof. Bernd Brügge, Dr. Stephan Krusche and Jan Philip Bernius from the TUM Department of Informatics  for the automatic correction of free-text assignments: Student numbers continue to rise, creating enormous workloads for instructors, especially when it comes to correcting assignments. While certain tasks (e.g. multiple choice) correct themselves automatically, this is not possible for the frequently used free-text tasks. We aim to develop a learning system that uses machine learning to automatically correct assignments. The system will learn which solutions are correct and which are incorrect during the first corrections and can correct further solutions automatically. Our vision is that the correction effort can be significantly reduced while the quality of the correction increases.

Prof. Gerhard Müller und Dr. Francesca Taddei from the TUM Department of Civil, Geo and Environmental Engineering  for the project “Extended Brain - Curricula 2.0” to optimize teaching content while taking access to digital systems into account: In the course of adapting engineering education to new options resulting from digitalization as well as to requirements arising from it, categories for evaluating content have to be discussed and innovative didactic tools have to be developed. Current content will be evaluated with regard to the possibility of using an extended memory and ready-made tools, which are permanently available electronically. Obsolete content will be identified. At the same time, the focus is on interpreting and evaluating content and computational results retrieved via the Internet and black box programs. Instruments are being developed for this purpose.

Prof. Michael Suda und Prof. Hans Pretzsch from the School of Life Sciences for the project “Forest & Technology – VR2”: With this project, the Faculty of Forest Science and Resource Management is addressing a central and highly topical issue in forest sciences. Today, high-tech data acquisition and processing systems enable the mapping of natural structures in virtual systems. By modeling natural systems it is increasingly possible to simulate actions and to evaluate their effects on the ecosystem as well as with regard to social and economic aspects. In the context of the teaching project VR2 – virtual and real reality – teaching areas in the forest are defined, data relevant for decision-making are collected and linked to a virtual model. In this real laboratory, forestry measures are simulated and their effects on the overall system are recorded with the help of simulation models. In the virtual laboratory, this forest is also available for simulations. Here, too, appropriate measures can be planned and evaluated. The use of both laboratories in the training of students thus links different realities, which are indispensable for the targeted planning and use of forests.

Awardees of Previous Years

Contact Teaching Awards

Coordination Teaching Awards

TUM Center for Study and Teaching
Communications
Anne Hüttenrauch
Tel.: +49 89 289 22817
anne.huettenrauchspam prevention@tum.de​​​​​​​

ProLehre | Media and Didactics
Dr. Andreas Fleischmann
Tel.: +49 89 289 25364
Fax: +49 89 289 25209
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