With the Teaching Award 2025, The Hochschule Niederrhein honours the lecturers of four outstanding courses that exemplify innovative, practical orientation and future-oriented university lecturing. A total of 25 courses from the winter semester 2024/25 and the summer semester 2025 were nominated by students and the teaching staff.
Due to the exceptionally high quality of the submissions, the jury decided to award four distinctions this year instead of two. The lecturers receive prize money, which they can use specifically to further develop their teaching education.
The award-winning courses promote transdisciplinary work, international cooperation and project- and case-based learning. Students take responsibility for their learning process, work in heterogeneous teams, apply their knowledge to real-life issues and broaden their view beyond the boundaries of their own discipline.
Judith Collier (Faculty of Business Administration and Economics) and Professor Anne Schwarz-Pfeiffer (Faculty of Textile and Clothing Technology) were distinguished for their course "Pitch it Smart - Communicating Challenges in Smart Textiles". In this COIL event (Collaborative Online International Learning), students from The Hochschule Niederrhein and The Hague University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands worked online in interdisciplinary teams. The aim was to develop effective communication strategies that convincingly and credibly address the sustainability challenges of a smart textile product. The jury particularly recognised the transdisciplinary collaboration, the intercultural communication and the methodically well thought-out integration of different specialist and university cultures.
Prof Dr Frauke Austermann (Faculty of Business Administration and Economics) received the prize for her course "HR Administration and HR Analytics". The students worked on real-life HR management issues. The Hochschule Niederrhein's Division of Personnel acted as a practical partner, combined with input from numerous guest speakers from exciting companies, which directly linked the course content to professional reality. The jury emphasised that Austermann's concept was convincing due to its methodologically sound, practical orientation and the combination of theory-based learning with real-life problems.
The teaching team Prof. Lisa Freyschmidt, Prof. Nora Gummert-Hauser (Faculty of Design) and Prof. Anna Koch (Faculty of Textile and Clothing Technology) received the distinction for the "Tabletop & Textile" project. In the interdisciplinary course, students from the Design Engineering Textile and Product and Communication Design degree programmes worked in tandems on a tableware project. The jury emphasised that the event not only enabled practical orientation, but also gave the students the opportunity to implement a project from the initial idea to the professional presentation at the international Ambiente trade fair in Frankfurt.
Professor Hendrik Poschmann (Faculty of Industrial Engineering) received the award for his course "Business and Technology Ethics". The students dealt with ethical issues that went beyond their own faculties and applied different approaches to concrete practical cases from technology and business. The jury emphasised that the course opened up new perspectives for the students, encouraged them to think outside the box and prepared them to act responsibly in a technology-driven professional world.
