Ulrich Krühne receives DTU's Teaching Award 2024

On 21 November, Ulrich Krühne - Associate Professor and Head of Studies of the bachelor’s programmes Chemical and Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering & International Business - was honoured with the DTU Teaching Award 2024 for his innovative work on integrating digital tools into teaching.

“Ulrich Krühne receives the teaching award because he shows us exemplary examples of how teachers can use digitalisation to strengthen students‘ learning and competencies - and at the same time free up important time for teachers,” says Dean of Studies and Student Affairs, Lars D. Christoffersen.

Making a virtue out of necessity

When Ulrich Krühne took on the task of heading two study programmes and at the same time had to teach and have time for his research, he had to think creatively to make time for everything: “I had to come up with something that would free up time and at the same time ensure that my students received good and engaging teaching,” he says.

“I'd had good experiences with acting out a real-life audit in the course ‘Good Manufacturing Practice and quality in pharmaceutical, biotech and food industry’, where students investigate a company's quality management systems. It was fun and educational but time-consuming. So I partnered with PhD student Fiammetta Caccavale to develop ChatGMP (Good Manufacturing Practice), where we used Large Language Models and collected data from the previous audits to develop a closed AI that can now successfully run all audits with students.”

Programming increases understanding and learning

Ulrich Krühne took the same innovative approach to solving teaching challenges in the ‘Chemical Reaction Engineering’ course, where some students struggled to get to grips with stoichiometry, the calculation of volume ratios in chemical reactions, which is fundamental knowledge in chemistry:

“It's one thing to know how to get a correct result, but if you don't understand why you get the correct result, you risk making mistakes in later assignments. So I had to shake things up,” says Ulrich Krühne. Therefore, he introduced the Python programming language for students to use in the course to solve two minor homework problems with the help of Fiametta Caccavale's teaching material:

"Solving the problems requires students to have a basic understanding of the theory otherwise they can't programme them. And we can see in the exams that it helps them, even though they might not initially like it,’ he smiles. ‘But it's important to have your basic knowledge in place, and engineers need to be able to programme. It gives them an edge over other graduates when they enter the labour market."