Wolfgang Nowak, principal investigator in SimTech and SFB 1313, has been awarded with the "Teaching Prize 2020" of the Faculty 2 (Civil and Environmental Engineering) of the University of Stuttgart. He has especially been awarded for his outstanding online lecture "Statistics". The students of the faculty chose Wolfgang Nowak, head of the Department of Stochastic Simulation and Safety Research for Hydrosystems (LS³) at the Institute for Modelling Hydraulic and Environmental Systems (IWS), among three proposals of the student organizations. In their nomination, the students praise Professor Nowak and his team for engaging students in the courses with interactive media that included the use of humor.
Wolfgang Nowak emphasizes at the award ceremony, "I am very pleased that my commitment to teaching is recognized with this award, but I would like to emphasize that the great commitment to online teaching would not have been possible without the support of my team, especially Sebastian Reuschen, Simon Moreno and Anneli Guthke."
Sophie Walch, a student of environmental engineering, highlights, "Prof. Nowak has been particularly successful in motivating us students. He used brainteasers to encourage us to directly apply the knowledge we had been taught. This made the lecture very varied. Also, the structured and creative combination of video lectures with ILIAS applications, short weekly summary videos and interactive short tests made the material very understandable and thus fascinated us for stochastics during the whole lecture period."
The Dean of the Faculty, Prof. Garrecht, emphasized the importance of teaching for the Faculty when presenting the award. He welcomed the fact that this year's prize, now awarded for the third time, was a response to the special challenges of online teaching and an acknowledgement of the commitment there.