With this year’s teaching award for early career scientists (ECRs), we honor colleagues who showed extraordinary efforts in adapting classical formats to the challenges of online and hybrid teaching in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic. The award highlights teaching formats and courses that made optimal and innovative use of online/hybrid teaching formats, and which serve as showcases for how high-level didactic approaches could be achieved or maintained despite the difficult circumstances.
Christoph Burger received this award for two courses – a course for master’s students in clinical psychology (TEWA) and the Supervised Orientation Tutorial (SOT) for first-year bachelor’s students, in which he served as a faculty advisor. Despite the significant difference between the two courses, he quickly modified the concepts in light of the pandemic. In his course for master’s students, they usually plan, prepare, conduct, and present their own studies. He changed his didactic concept, so students were able to achieve these learning goals via distance learning. For bachelor’s students, the main goal was to teach core competencies and orientation for a successful start in their academic life—even under the given circumstances. Evaluations and feedback from his students confirmed that this endeavor was highly appreciated and successful.