




My joy for teaching goes back to my years of study when I worked as a guide in a large natural history museum (Senckenberg Museum, Frankfurt). I gained my first experience in university teaching during my PhD studies at Freiburg, Germany, as a leader of mapping courses and field classes. At Salzburg University, I am actively involved in teaching geology as well as biology students (future teachers). My teaching portfolio covers petrography, geological profiles, an introductory course into geoscientific methods, a field-trip to the surroundings of Salzburg as well as an advanced course dealing with methods applied in Historic Geology. In total I have taught more than 50 courses.
NEWS: Distance teaching award 2021
With the outbreak of COVID-19 in early 2020 teaching has been severely affected by the shift to e-learning. Providing alternative pathways was an unprecedented challenge particularly for those classes, that require a physical setup. In my case, this was an introductory course into petrography and geological profiles, two areas conceivably unsuitable for distance learning. By nature, rock and mineral identification is a haptic process, and I believe that pictures are not enough! Following this belief, my student assistant and I expanded the rock specimen collection and packed individual boxes for each student. Recorded PowerPoint slides guided them through this part of the course. Weekly online meetings coupled with a large number of self-made videos set the frame for a successful online setup for the second part. This course has recently been awarded the Distance Teaching Award of the University of Salzburg for the study year 2020/21.
Many colleagues contributed in one way or the other to this successful version of my course: Among them, our “Tutorin” / student assistant Sandra Graser was a tremendous help, Gerti Friedl contributed many samples for the boxes, and Jake Ciborowski from the University of Brighton shared a lot of great and very helpful material for online teaching. I really appreciated this! And after all, the commitment and enthusiasm of the course participants made the effort more than worth it!
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