Teaching philosophy and concepts

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At GIM we are convinced that active student engagement is a necessary prerequisite for deep learning and therefore strive to provide an open atmosphere and regularly ask questions (e.g., anonymous online live quizzes during the lectures) and encourage discussions during our offered courses. We take student feedback and evaluations very seriously and aim to improve our courses continuously. We are also in the process of designing new applied geophysical field courses and enjoy the possibility to witness students putting their acquired knowledge on applied geophysical methods and the studied processes into practice. After data acquisition, the processing and interpretation of the data are the important next steps. Not only in the geosciences, the ability to process and analyze large data sets is a crucial proficiency on today’s job market. We therefore believe that programming should be an integral part of geoscientific education and complement the lectures on M.Sc. level with hands-on Python exercises leveraging on RWTH’s excellent JupyterHub infrastructure.

During the shift to online teaching in 2020, we quickly set-up a semi-professional studio for online live lectures and recordings. Our efforts for (digital) teaching were recently acknowledged with the best teaching award by the student council Earth sciences and resource management and with the teaching award of the Faculty of Georesources and Materials Engineering at RWTH Aachen University. We are currently focusing on the development of hybrid lecture concepts and aim to allow student participation in presence as well as online.