The Förderverein of the Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences (HNU) awarded prizes for outstanding digital teaching for the first time on 1 December 2020. During a live online video conference with over 250 participants, Günter Augustin, Chairman of the Friends of Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences, honoured the achievements of lecturers in the 2020 summer semester for outstanding digital teaching. The sponsoring association offered two prizes of 1,000 euros each: a prize for professors and a prize for lecturers. A total of 13 concepts were submitted from all three faculties.
Award in the category "Professors": Remote Microcontroller Laboratory
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Dany Meyer of the Faculty of Information Management convinced with her concept for the course "Car IT" in the degree programme "Information Management Automotive" and won the prize in the category "Professors". For Prof. Meyer, practical orientation should also play a central role in the purely online semester. She therefore designed and implemented the technical experiments of the course for an online microcontroller laboratory via remote access. The students thus took part in practical exercises on real microcontroller boards with electronic circuits from home via remote access. Each group was assigned a laptop, which the students could access around the clock and thus much more flexibly than in the usual on-site lectures. Prof. Meyer aligned the laptops so that their respective cameras pointed to an assigned circuit. Student groups were thus able to work on their programmes together via zoom video conference in the remote lab and observe the effects of their programming live and thus, for example, read sensor values and implement alarm functions. The remote microcontroller lab was very well received by the students and will be a fixed component of the courses in the coming semesters.
Award in the category "Lecturers": Multi-day online block course with extensive mix of methods
Helmut Demmelhuber, lecturer at the Faculty of Health Management, and Andrea Lührs, Faculty Assistant Health Management, won the prize in the category "Lecturers" for the "Practical Course" in the degree programme "Business Administration in Health Care". The objective of this event was for the participants to work through the knowledge and experience gained during the practical semester, to exchange ideas with each other (introductory and final block), to receive individual practical professional orientation and to use the possibilities of experience transfer (maintaining experience and passing on experience).
The challenge of this block event with over 50 students was to transfer a programme lasting several days into a live online concept via video conferencing and at the same time to enable maximum activation and exchange. Through a methodologically and didactically innovative concept with self-organised and moderated phases, this challenge was realised innovatively and successfully. A variety of activating methods and exchange formats (role plays, online group work, tasks for reflection, short inputs, ...) ensured a varied and exciting learning experience. The students reported back that this format should be retained in the future due to the methodological-didactic concept and the more intensive learning experiences associated with it.
