KITE Award

With this prize the KdL aims

• to increase the status of teaching at ETH Zurich and its visibility outside the institution;
• to honour innovative approaches to teaching which improve the learning success of students, thereby visibly demonstrating that development of teaching and learning methods substantially increases the quality of education;
•  to motivate teachers to take part actively in this development;
• to make successful teaching approaches known and available across disciplinary boundaries.
  
   

The criteria that will be applied in awarding the KITE Award are – besides the focus on student engagement - innovation, effectiveness and sustainability and can be presented as follows:

Innovativeness: Teaching will be understood as innovative if it follows new didactic approaches and methods and supports new forms of knowledge transfer, interaction, independent learning and feedback, thereby creating new possibilities for online teaching and learning that have potential for application after the pandemic. This may also include teaching materials or digital learning environments that have been developed and deployed to promote effective learning.

Effectiveness: Teaching is effective if it (also by remote means) transfers and consolidates knowledge and competences sustainably. Students are led to take new approaches in their thinking, and they reflect critically on what they are learning. They are deeply engaged, they demonstrate effective and sustained learning. In doing so, the effectiveness of the teaching should be measurable and demonstrable.

Sustainability: The sustainability of projects is determined by whether they can be transposed to other subjects and disciplines. Decisive here are estimates of how far the online scenario will have a long-term effect on ETH teaching, how it will affect future curricula beyond the pandemic, and how it will contribute thereby to digitisation of teaching.

Candidates (individuals or teams) are nominated by any of the following bodies:

• The Heads of Department (DKs)
• The Departement Conferences, or
• The ETH Teaching Commission

Nomination proceeds in two steps:

Step 1: In a short written message, the Department Head names the projects and associated people nominated by their respective Department Conferences. The submission date for this message is June 30, 2023. Please send your nominations in German or English by email to Julia Kehl, KITE Award project manager (LET): .

Step 2: The persons responsible for the nominated projects are invited by the KdL by end of June 2023 to describe their project or course with reference to the criteria described. The nominated projects will be provided with a template for submission. The deadline for submitting the complete documentation is September 29, 2023.

The KdL deploys a subcommittee as per Art. 14 of its bylaws, which acts as a selection committee. It is composed of four members of KdL; the President of the Executive Board Teaching Commission; the holder of the ETH Chair of Learning Sciences; one representative each of VSETH and AVETH; and an external member. One of the KdL members takes the chair and has the deciding vote if there is a tie.