From the President’s Office: Prof. Dr Marco Winzker

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Billy Ocean had a good answer to John Lennon’s (“Life is what happens to you/While you‘re busy making other plans”) in 1985 with “When the going gets tough/The tough get going”. And it is precisely in this spirit that many doers at the university have expanded their problem-solving skills in 2021.

We have met the challenges of the coronavirus pandemic with commitment and creativity: online teaching, hybrid teaching, partial catching up on lab courses missed due to the pandemic. Organising and implementing online exams in various formats, including selfprogrammed random generators for individualised assignments to ensure fairness on examinations. At the same time, we do not forget the students as individual people and facilitate social interaction at events such as virtual gaming evenings. With all the options available online, we recognise, perhaps more so than before, the value of presence and will certainly live it more consciously in the future. Despite the spontaneous challenges, we can implement many plans and expansion ideas for teaching. The overarching theme of sustainability is addressed with campus gardens and sustainable food in daily student life. Supported by the new foundation “Innovation in University Teaching”, we are merging a Business Psychology project with the digitalisation of teaching. By doing so, we are combining the fostering of future skills through peer training with competence-oriented e-assessment.

In order to do justice to the claim of teaching as a scientific activity, we establish curriculum workshops as well as data-based assessment through evaluation of teaching at all levels.

All this is well received by our students! In the latest KOAB graduate survey, H-BRS was ranked first in student satisfaction. So everyone is benefitting from the fact that teachers and students can develop with us.

Prof. Dr Marco Winzker

Vice President for Teaching, Learning and Further Education