State Teaching Prize Awarded to Freiburg and Tübingen

Researchers Julia Gurol and Ingo Henneberg of the University of Freiburg's Department of Political Science have been awarded the 2019 State Teaching Prize together with their colleagues from the University of Tübingen. The state of Baden-Württemberg's Ministry of Education, Research, and Art (MWK) biennially presents the 50 thousand euro award for outstanding teaching and educational work. This year marks the first time that a cooperative project between universities has been honored. Gurol are Henneberg are being recognized for their interactive, multi-site, multi-state seminar, which applies modern video conferencing technology and the online learning platform ILIAS.

The University of Freiburg has been offering the seminar in varied formats since 2016. It has already received a number of awards. When viewed as a teaching concept, the continuing development of lectures and seminars combine classical methods of teaching with newer approaches, such as the "flipped classroom," for example. Students in a flipped classroom leave their role as listeners and are more intensively integrated in preparing and processing content. Political questions surrounding contemporary events and varied of crises of recent years have been the contextual focal points. A lecture by an expert is usually held in the run-up to the seminar in order to prepare for the actual topic. "Especially in political science, it's really great to be able to connect with international guests – from Britain, when it's about Brexit; or Africa, if we're talking about migration," says Gurol. The teachers responsible for the program use many digital study methods in order to teach journalistic and technical skills in addition to classical knowledge of political science. "The students carried out radio and video interviews for the seminar, or they created surveys, or produced a literature pod-cast in which a small team reproduced the content of the required lectures," explains Henneberg. At the end of the course, all the preparatory and follow-up content was digitally played into ILIAS to make it permanently accessible, he continues. Together with two other researchers, the University of Freiburg political scientist conceived of the idea for this teaching concept in 2015. Since then, Henneberg has played a significant role in its design and further development.

Julia Gurol is relatively new to the team. In 2018, she took on the lecture series as a teacher, and now, after the contextual and organizational work, aims to make it a permanent offering. "In order to reduce the high level of initial effort in the long-term, we want to develop modules that form the seminar framework that we will be able to reuse them in the coming semester," says Gurol. She goes on to say that this would make the format more attractive for other institutions. In addition to Freiburg and Tübingen, many other universities all over Germany took part in the award-winning seminar. "Of course the honor belongs to all of them," says Henneberg.

In conjunction with the presentation of the award, Baden-Württemberg's State Research Minister Theresia Bauer said, "During times of globalization and digital access to knowledge, networking and sharing are more important than ever in order for us to remain an innovative state with first-class educators. Students in Freiburg and Tübingen have shown that networking and international participation to acquire knowledge works in the digital age – and what is more, in a highly relevant subject area."

Press release of the MWK (only German)

Video with more information (only German)

Interview with Julia Gurol and Ingo Henneberg in the Online-Magazine