VAUXHALL 2020: A unique online experience
Everyone truly deserves appreciation, whether it is a student or a teacher. Don’t you agree?! That is why Scintilla organizes a Teacher’s Award Ceremony every year. The winner of this award is selected by the students themselves. Some of us may ask the question how? Well, do you remember the sort of ‘Teacher evaluation’ form that you fill in at the end of each quartile? These votes then result in the final award winner. The top 5 Nominees for this year’s ‘Valuable Award for University’s most eXperienced, Helpful, Appealing and Lustrous Lecturers (VAUXHALL)’ were Raymond Veldhuis, Tracy Craig, Bram Nauta, Chris Zeinstra and Luuk Spreeuwers (in no particular order).
Well of course, just like how corona altered a lot of events this year, it also affected the Vauxhall Ceremony; not just once but rather twice, after which it was shifted to an online platform. Well, due to this change, the event this year turned out to be quite different from the usual annual event. Apart from the award nominees being present at this celebratory occasion, there were several other lecturers that were also invited to join as well as students that were interested in participating.
The ceremony started with a brief introduction, and a continuation into who the nominees for the award were. During the time before the winner was announced, to compensate for the conversations that would happen physically in an ideal situation, there were now ‘virtual escape rooms’ that had to be solved by groups of both students and teachers mixed together. This indeed turned out to be very successful and fun. Simultaneously, in the middle of the escape room, the nominees were invited to answer some question about themselves, often including some fun quotes that were made by them. At the end of the escape room challenge, the funny part was that some of the teachers got an idea about the difficulty that students sometimes face when multi-tasking, that is listening and making notes in a lecture at the same time.
The winner of the Vauxhall Award was Distinguished Prof Bram Nauta. This was something quite a few of us knew about in April when the actual ceremony was to be held, but Corona apparently had different plans for us all.
To add to the fun and surprise that this year’s VAUXHALL Ceremony brought to, there was one last surprise, an award for the ‘Best Online Teacher’. The selection for this award was done in a manner similar to the other award. The award for the ‘Best Online Teacher’ went to Tracy Craig. The Vauxhall committee went over to Bram’s and Tracy’s respective houses to hand over their award in person slightly before the main event so that they could open it in front of all the participants. Aside from that, there were also small tokens handed out to the other 3 nominees. Tiny goody bags filled with either special beer or wine, and snacks were distributed to the participants to help celebrate this wonderful occasion.
To conclude, the ceremony this year was unique and different in the nicest sense possible, and has definitely made a mark for future ceremonies
